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06.08.15

Links 8/6/2015: Red Hat Upgraded, Debian 8.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 4:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Debunking 4 misconceptions about open source software

    Misconceptions range from the belief that open source is not secure enough for businesses, since it is community-based, to misunderstandings about the availability and quality of technical support. While some of them have been propagated since the early days of open source, enterprise-ready offerings today provide the same, if not higher, levels of security, capabilities and reliability as proprietary counterparts.

  • 2/3 Internet Exchange Points use Czech open source router

    Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Internet Exchange Points are now using BIRD, an open source router solution maintained by the Czech CZ.NIC Association, taking first place from proprietary routers.

  • 3 Financial Companies Innovating With Open Source

    The financial industry is on the verge of an open source breakthrough, say three companies on the cutting edge of the trend. Traditionally very secretive about their technology, banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies have begun in the past few years to talk about how they use open source software in their infrastructure and product development. They have also been steadily increasing their contributions to upstream projects in the form of user feedback and code. And some companies have initiated their own open source projects or released portions of their own code to the open source community.

  • Open-Source NFV Group Launches First Software Release

    The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project has rolled out “Arno,” an open-source platform that group officials said will give users and developers a framework for testing NFV efforts, checking out basic NFV uses cases and trying out virtual network functions (VNFs). The growing demand among telecommunications vendors and other organizations for ways to more quickly adopt and implement NFV is driving the OPNFV’s efforts, according to Chris Price, technical steering committee chairman and open-source manager for software-defined networking (SDN), NFV and the cloud for network vendor Ericsson.

  • NASA Releases Source Code for Its Software Tools

    NASA has released the source code for a complete set of software tools that that cover pretty much everything from aeronautics and propulsion, and from system testing and handling.

  • Events

    • SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

      From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

    • Open education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation

      When I started working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we set out to revamp the website and add learning materials for educators. In the mean time, we wanted to get a few resources out in time for Hour of Code week, so we wrote them on GitHub for easy sharing. It’s easy to get started writing with markdown, and it made collaboration straightforward. Despite all being new to GitHub, the education team really liked the way this worked and wanted to stick with the method, so we did.

  • BSD

    • Call for testing: OpenSSH 6.9

      OpenSSH 6.9 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This release contains some substantial new features and a number of bugfixes.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Indian government includes open source in RFPs

      The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has asked that open source software-based applications be included in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for all new procurements. Note there is not a plan at this time to replace existing proprietary systems with open source software.

    • Estonia: A Model for e-Government

      The bold plan is a logical step forward in an unprecedented roll-out of e-government services that began in 2000, when Estonia introduced a public system for electronic tax filing. In 2002, Estonia introduced a universal electronic identification card with digital signatures, which every citizen gets at the age of 15. The ID cards and signatures have become the keys to nearly universal access to government information and services as well as private-sector services in health care, banking and education, and law. In the years since, the Estonian government and industry have put more and more functions online, all connected by a nationwide data backbone called X-Road.

    • New case studies proof competence gvSIG’s GIS tools

      Four case studies published the past weeks by the gvSIG community show the usefulness of this suite of open source Geographic Information Systems. The cases detail the gvSIG use by public administrations in Spain and Italy, to collect, manage and analyse information on gas pipelines, to create hiking trails, examine city commerce, and plan public transport networks.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source “MMO for makers” aims to crowdsource manufacturing design

      Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including “mods” that leverage the games’ simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.

  • Programming

    • A Heterogeneous Execution Engine Might Make Its Way To LLVM

      An intern from Qualcomm’s Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he’s hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project.

    • C++ at a functional programming event

      In the end, I decided to talk about functional reactive proramming in C++ which will be a thrilling and enticing tale of event-based systems and the power of reactive streams. I’ll also cover some fun new things we are to expect from C++17 that are bringing even more functional programming concepts than we have in the current standard

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Labour Call Unemployed “The Work-Shy”

      I just read the Guardian’s account of today’s Labour leadership hustings, and they are not Tory Lite, they are Tory High Octane. Supporting Tory benefit cuts, calling the unemployed “the work-shy”, defending £9,000 a year tuition fees, supporting Trident and falling over themselves to reject autonomy for the Scottish accounting unit. But what I find even more astonishing is that the Fabian Society audience were lining up afterwards for selfies with Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and according to the Guardian nobody wanted a photo with Jeremy Corbyn, the one decent human being there.

    • Urgent: TTIP Vote – Please Write to Your MEPs before Wednesday

      There is a very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday…

    • Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

      My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering.

  • Censorship

    • Lawyer who sued EFF blames Ars readers for hacking, defamation

      Atlanta IP lawyer Sanford Asman isn’t happy that CaseRails CEO Erik Dykema won’t hand his company’s name over to him—in fact, he’s filed a trademark lawsuit over it, just as he said he would last month.

      Asman believes that CaseRails is infringing his trademark rights to CaseWebs and CaseSpace, two websites that house his own litigation-management software. In fact, Asman believes any Web-based legal software with “case” in its name should be under his purview.

  • Privacy

    • The Mass Surveillance of US Public Continues as USA Today Declares It Ended

      And that points to a bigger problem with declaring that the NSA’s data collection has “ended”: The same data will still be collected, only it will be held in phone company computers rather than the NSA’s computers. The NSA will still have access to the data, only having to get an OK from the FISA court–a notorious rubberstamp that operates in secret. As NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe told FAIR, “It’s more of a psychological maneuver to make us all feel good than a true constraint.”

  • Civil Rights

    • LAPD officer convicted in videotaped beating of handcuffed suspect

      A Los Angeles Police Department officer was convicted Friday in connection to the videotaped beating of a female suspect who was struck in the throat and crotch in a patrol car.

      Officer Mary O’Callaghan, an 18-year veteran, was accused of felony assault under the color of authority in a 2012 incident largely captured on a patrol-car camera. The 35-year-old victim, Alesia Thomas, died later that July evening. Medical examiner officials said cocaine intoxication was a “major factor” in the Los Angeles woman’s death.

    • Save Majid Ali

      Glasgow City College student Majid Ali faces torture and death if returned to Pakistan. Majid Ali’s brother and other members of his immediate family have been taken and I am afraid very probably murdered by the Pakistani authorities as part of their relentless persecution of the Baloch people and desire to wipe out Baloch national identity. The UK Home Office intends to deport Majid. The people of Scotland must defend him.

    • Saudi court upholds blogger’s 10 years and 1,000 lashes

      Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court has upheld the sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment on blogger Raif Badawi, despite a foreign outcry.

      Speaking from Canada, his wife Ensaf Haidar told the BBC she feared his punishment would start again on Friday.

      Badawi was arrested in 2012 for “insulting Islam through electronic channels”.

    • There is no justice: What cops and courts get wrong about the human brain

      Neuroscience explains why our justice system keeps sending innocent people to prison — and letting guilty ones go

    • Kalief Browder, 1993–2015

      Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

      In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

      Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

      [...]

      Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.

    • Left Divided as Violence and Protests Derail Mexican Elections

      Mexico’s latest elections are threatened by drug cartel violence, social protests, and the mass resignation of election officials. The left, which in the past has succeeded in rallying a third or more of the nation’s voters for a single party, goes into this election deeply divided, prompting expectations of a win for the ruling party.

    • On Equality

      A good rule of thumb is that if we feel the views of others are offensive, they probably feel our own views are offensive as well, a view they are completely entitled to when they do not act on it to harm us. If we wish to have our freedom to own and express our views protected, we must also actively respect — preferably protect — the rights of others to the same freedom.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Commission Tries to Rip Citizens Off Net Neutrality

      The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

  • DRM

    • Apple Music and the terrible return of DRM

      My Amazon Echo just arrived, months after I pre-ordered it. I’d totally forgotten about it until I got a ship notification the other day, and then it was there, a strange little tube promising yet another peek at a future that never seems fully within grasp.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

06.07.15

Links 7/6/2015: Steam Machines, KDE Applications 15.04.2 in Chakra

Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • LibrePlan manages projects at French research network

    Renater, France’s research and education telecom network, is probably the first public administration outside of Spain to use LibrePlan, an open source project management solution, assumes Jeroen Baten, involved in the tool’s development. The French network connectivity agency started using LibrePlan in early 2014, says Baten.

  • BMJ CTO Sharon Cooper making ‘everything open source’

    In order to build its wide range of products – more than 80 in total – the organisation relies heavily on bespoke development and open source technologies. This offers BMJ greater agility, as well as the cost benefits, said Cooper.

    “Open source has always been really important to us and probably why we have a reasonably big in-house team to manage all of that open source technology and to tie it all together. And I think it will become increasingly important,” she said.

  • Open source offers way into mature markets

    The answer, said Stirman, lies in open source. “The only way to move the needle is with an open-source strategy. First, get massive adoption. Then, figure out how to monetize it.”

    The freemium model has been a good way for companies to build businesses around open-source projects. Offer the community-built software for free, and then offer advanced security, support and tooling as a high-value, commercial edition.

  • HP open source UX project unifies user experience

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise has launched an open source UX that allows IT pros to provide a familiar user experience across different enterprise applications.

  • HP’s new open-source development framework heralds a major shift

    Between the new storage systems and management software announced at its annual customer conference this week, Hewlett-Packard sneaked in a small present for developers that promises to take some of the work out of building complex corporate applications. But what the framework perhaps lacks in disruptive potential it more than makes up for in strategic significance.

  • HP announces Grommet framework, Machine architecture and company split plans
  • How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, Part 4: The Key to Success

    I’ve been saying for some time now that open source was not about innovation, but rather freedom. It was the freedom to deploy what you want, when you want it that led to the massive global adoption of open source platforms. I get more than a little peeved, then, when I still see references in mainstream media circles about ragtag groups of conscientious hippies who don’t care about money and sing about sharing software. Don’t get me wrong, I *love* singing about sharing free software, but the false implication of this narrative is that there’s no money in free software. This is what Paul Krugman would call a “zombie lie” – an argument that just won’t go away no matter how many times you kill it with facts.

  • BitPay Launches Open Source, Multisig Wallet Copay

    Within a few days after its launch, over 1000 BTC has been stored on Copay already and the open source code on GitHub is being contributed by hundreds of bitcoin developers worldwide, offering improvements in the code and new features that could increase the east of use of the Copay wallet.

  • Capgemini Apollo: An Open Source Microservice and Big Data Platform

    Capgemini are currently working on Apollo, an open source application platform built on top of the Apache Mesos cluster manager, which is designed to power next generation web services, microservices and big data platforms running at scale.

  • New Rockchip Boards Added To Coreboot

    Support for two in-development Rockchip motherboard designs have been added to Coreboot for possible use in Chrome OS devices.

  • HP Discover Day 2: Avatar Partnership, Grommet Open Source Platform

    Day two of HP Discover 2015 kicked off on a fun note, with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Meg Whitman announcing the company has signed a five-year agreement with 20th Century Fox and James Cameron-owned production company Lightstorm Entertainment to integrate HP’s technology into the AVATAR movie franchise.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • How Mozilla’s Firefox OS may enlist Android apps to its cause

        The lack of apps are a common problem for operating systems challenging the two dominant mobile platforms, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Without crucial software like WhatsApp for text messaging, customers steer clear and head for better supported operating systems from the big two.

      • Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal Leaving for IoT Startup

        Mozilla’s PR cordon have not let me speak with Gal in several years, the last time I had the opportunity to speak with him was in January of 2013 as part of a FirefoxOS consumer push.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • MongoDB Outlines 2015 Ambitions for Open Source Document Database

      At the MongoDB World 2015 conference this week, MongoDB outlined forthcoming additions to the open source document database that cover everything from connectors to business intelligence applications that enable MongoDB to respond to SQL read requests to the ability to join data sets.

    • Scaling Open Source MySQL Database Environments

      One of the primary reasons IT organizations adopt NoSQL databases is because their current relational database can’t scale to meet their existing needs. But that makes the cost of migrating a database substantial. Given an option, most IT organizations would rather put off that expense as long as possible—if not forever.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • IceCat 31.7.0 release

      GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

    • One year of encryption with the Email Self-Defense guide

      Two years ago today, Edward Snowden tipped the first domino in a chain that led to a historic international conversation about the role of surveillance in modern life. One year ago today, we launched Email Self-Defense, an infographic and guide to encrypting your email with free software to protect your privacy and resist bulk surveillance.

    • GNU Social: a decentralized answer to Twitter

      In modern times social networking is a double edged sword. While it enables us to spread the word quickly, it also puts way much information on us in hands of companies like Facebook or Twitter. It also enables law enforcement authorities to crack down on activists.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Galicia invites nominations for open source award

      The government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain) is inviting the region’s universities to nominate open source projects for its annual Best Project award. The first prize is EUR 1500 and the second EUR 750.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Replace SourceForge with these Better Alternatives

      SourceForge is a long established web-based service that offers source code repository, downloads mirrors, bug tracker and other features. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage free and open-source software development.

    • OpenCV 3.0 Released: The Most Functional & Fastest Yet

      Version 3.0 of the Open Computer Vision library is now available. The release announcement reads, “With a great pleasure and great relief OpenCV team finally announces OpenCV 3.0 gold release, the most functional and the fastest OpenCV ever. And yet it’s very stable too – all the thousands of tests that we created during the project + many new tests pass successfully on Windows, Linux and Mac, x64 and ARM.”

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Sweden refines specifications of open standards

      Sweden’s governmental procurement specialists at Statens inköpscentral are fine-tuning the list of ICT standards that public authorities may use as mandatory requirements when procuring software and ICT services. The procurement agency is working with standardisation specialists at the University of Skövde, to check which ICT standards are truly open.

Leftovers

  • Alton Towers crash: Merlin closes three more theme park rides

    Four rollercoasters at three theme parks have been closed, following a crash at Alton Towers in which 16 people were injured, four seriously.

    The Smiler, which crashed, and Saw, a similar ride at Thorpe Park, will both be shut “for the foreseeable future”, owner Merlin Entertainment confirmed.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • U.S. Medicine Has Entered the Post-Antibiotic World

      Fighting drug-resistant bacteria is becoming an urgent national public health priority.

    • Review: ‘Every Last Child,’ a Front-Line View of the Polio Crisis in Pakistan

      The film never fully examines the causes of that resentment (though rationales shift). Early in the campaign, Islamist conservatives were rankled that many health workers were women. But the opposition reached its new, murderous level after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. In the aftermath, it was reported that the C.I.A. had used a vaccination program (for hepatitis) as a ruse to help locate Bin Laden. Thus, Taliban leaders claimed that all vaccination programs were fronts for Western spying, banning them in their spheres of influence.

  • Security

    • Let’s Encrypt Root and Intermediate Certificates

      Let’s Encrypt will issue certificates to subscribers from its intermediate CAs, allowing us to keep our root CA safely offline. IdenTrust will cross-sign our intermediates. This will allow our end certificates to be accepted by all major browsers while we propagate our own root.

    • Security updates for Friday
    • Phishers Going the Long Way Round to Avoid Filtering Systems

      Any human with an email address likely has gotten thousands of spam messages that look like delivery notifications, invoices, or other alleged communications from shipping companies such as UPS or DHL. They typically contain malicious attachments with exploits for a browser or plug-in vulnerability, but a researcher at the University of Cambridge has run across a novel twist on this kind of spam that turns out to be a completely different kind of attack.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Majority Americans say U.S. mission in Afghanistan fails: poll

      A majority of Americans say the U.S. military mission has failed in Afghanistan, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s global war of “targeted killings” by drones has raised deep concern among the U.S. public, a latest poll showed.

      According to a national survey by the Pew Research Center in late May, 56 percent of Americans say the United States has mostly failed in achieving its goals in Afghanistan, while 36 percent say the U.S. mission has mostly succeeded.

    • 149,000 people have died in war in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, report says

      War has directly resulted in the deaths of 149,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2001 and 2014, according to estimates in a new report released by Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. That figure includes U.S. military members, contractors, and opposition fighters – as well as at least 26,270 civilians in Afghanistan, and 21,500 in Pakistan.

    • Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us?

      In 2012, the entrance to John Marshall High School in Los Feliz was closed to protect students from falling debris. The gothic tower above the entrance was crumbling, so a wooden platform was built atop a tunnel of scaffolding to catch falling brick and concrete.

      Three years later, the scaffolding is still there. The district earmarked roughly $1 million for the job long ago, and the principal told me last week that she’s hoping it won’t be much longer now.

    • How a handshake in Helsinki helped end the Cold War

      Eight hundred years ago this summer, King John and a group of feudal barons gathered at Runnymede on the banks of the Thames River. There he agreed to the Magna Carta, which for the first time limited the absolute power of the monarch and established a contract between ruler and ruled. The mother of modern treaties and law, the Magna Carta began a global conversation about the responsibility of the powerful toward people under their control.

      A scant four decades ago, also this summer, another gathering in the Finnish capital of Helsinki produced a second series of accords. While far less well known, the signing of the Helsinki Accords was a critical juncture in the long struggle of the individual against state authority. Building on some of the same ideas that undergirded the Magna Carta, the Helsinki Accords codified a broad set of individual liberties, human rights, and state responsibilities, which remain strikingly relevant today, whether the subject is China’s Internet policy, the Islamic State’s latest outrage, or the American “war on terror.” The language of human rights has become the lingua franca for criticizing misbehavior by states or quasi-governments.

    • US combat drone goes down in southern Iraq

      An Iraqi security source says a US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has crashed in the country’s southern province of Basra as it was supposed to join the US-led air campaign against the so-called ISIL positions in the restive western Iraqi province of Anbar.

    • German Federal Prosecutor investigating US actions on drones base

      The German Federal Prosecutor is reported to have begun investigating a US base in Germany that is used as a ‘hub’ for drone strikes, days after a Yemeni man testified in a Cologne court about the 2012 strike that killed his relatives.

    • War, Imperialism and the People’s Struggle in the Middle East

      Reports of the number of Yemenis killed in the fighting range from 2,000-4,000 with many more injured and displaced. Yemeni-Americans who have been attempting to leave the country since late March have been abandoned by Washington.

    • A dangerous modesty

      America has learnt the hard way that it cannot fix the problems of the Middle East.

    • Here’s What Young Muslims Around the World Really Think of Obama and America

      Six years ago, President Barack Obama gave a historic speech to the Muslim world from Cairo. He called for “a new beginning” and apologized for the injustice and misunderstanding that have stained relations in the past. Though Obama faced skepticism from many corners, the speech was generally well-received, and many Muslims, from the Middle East to Indonesia, hoped that his election would mark a clear departure from the mistrust that characterized the years of the Bush administration.

    • Special Forces officer under investigation by Army called to testify at whistleblower hearing

      A Green Beret officer who raised questions on Capitol Hill about U.S. hostage policy and was placed under criminal investigation by the Army has been called to testify in a Senate hearing examining reprisals that government whistleblowers can face, congressional officials said.

    • Army stops paying war hero amid whistleblower probe
    • Army whistleblower asked to testify on Bergdahl
    • U.S. Army stops paying Green Beret war hero amid whistleblower probe
    • Circle Of Deceit: Hani Mujahid’s Path To Al Jazeera

      Hani Mujahid chose to tell his story to Al Jazeera because he felt trapped: When the al-Qaeda operative-turned Yemeni government informant tried to brief the CIA on his allegations that Yemen had been playing a double game in the fight against al-Qaeda, he found himself detained and badly beaten by Yemeni security personnel.

      No longer able to trust any of the stakeholders, he turned to the media to tell his story. If his allegations prove true, they will be deeply embarrassing to the US.

    • US envoy in talks with Yemen rebels on peace conference

      The United States confirmed that an American envoy has held talks in Oman with Iran-backed Yemeni rebels to convince them to attend a Geneva peace conference in mid-June.

      The news of the talks came with a conference on Yemen having been scrapped just days before it was due to be held on May 28, dealing a blow to UN efforts to broker peace in a country where at least 2,000 people have been killed since March.

    • U.S. has a long history of treating veterans poorly

      May 25 was Memorial Day, when Americans are supposed to remember military veterans, particularly those who made sacrifices — lives, lives, sanity — fighting our wars.

      As usual, rhetoric was abundant. People hung flags. Some placed flowers on military graves. There were parades, including one in which a reporter got hit by a drone. President Barack Obama added an oddly pacifist twist to his annual speech, noting that it was “the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.”

      Excuse me while I puke.

      Talk is nice, but veterans need action. Disgusting but true: when it comes to actual help — spending enough money to make sure they can live with dignity — talk is all the U.S. has to offer.

    • The numbers game

      These figures suggest that Daesh-bigots are being killed at the rate of around 50 a day though each mission is responsible for only 2.4 deaths. This latter figure can be explained by the reality that mission planners have been more likely to detect and attack supply vehicles than concentrations of terrorist fighters. There have also been intelligence-led precision bombings on gatherings of the Daesh leadership.

    • Papillon at Abu Ghraib,Bagram & Gitmo

      When one reads Papillon or views the film, one should be ever mindful that what our government is doing to others in our name is actually worse than what the French did to their criminals… and these were actual criminals, tried and convicted in courts of law, unlike the majority of those we kept and still keep in our foreign prisons. Most of them have had no ‘ day in court ‘ with proper legal representation. How sad this empire has become!

    • US Conventional Prompt Strike Potential Implications For The Asia Pacific – Analysis

      The U.S. military continues to explore long-range conventional prompt strike capabilities to strike “time-sensitive” targets across the globe on very short notice. Known as Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS), the programme has not yet translated into operational weapon systems because of technological and political challenges. Yet, it makes sense to start thinking about the possible introduction of conventional prompt strike systems, including intermediate range, into the Asia Pacific theatre.

    • “Combat Proven”: The Booming Business of War in Israel

      The Israel Trade Fairs and Convention Center was bustling with military personnel. Tall, broad-shouldered soldiers donning masks and sunglasses had their guns at the ready, and a mini-drone built at Ariel University, an Israeli school located in the occupied West Bank, went up in the air, flying high as the press snapped photos.

      This was not war, but one of the many demos held at the ISDEF expo, an annual June event that attracts thousands of security officials and professionals interested in weapons. Arms fairs in Israel showcase the latest products the profitable Israeli weapons industry manufactures — and the demos are the perfect place to show those products off.

    • Israel’s Clandestine Alliance with Gulf Arab States is Going Public

      In 2009, a U.S. State Department diplomatic cable gave one of the first glimpses of a burgeoning alliance between Israel and the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The cable quoted Israeli Foreign Ministry official Yacov Hadas saying, “the Gulf Arabs believe in Israel’s role because of their perception of Israel’s close relationship with the United States,” adding that GCC states “believe Israel can work magic.”

      Israel and the Gulf states also shared an interest in countering what they saw as rising Iranian influence in the Middle East. So while the two sides sparred in public — Israel’s “Cast Lead” military operation had just claimed more than 1,400 lives in the Gaza Strip and was condemned by Saudi Arabia, in a letter to the United Nations, as “fierce aggression” — they enjoyed “good personal relations” behind closed doors, Hadas said, according to one cable. Hadas reportedly added that the Gulf Arabs were still “not ready to do publicly what they say in private.”

    • Former CIA Officer: FBI Surveillance Aircraft Program Unconstitutional

      A former US Central Intelligence Agency officer Larry Johnson claims that a FBI program that deploys small aircraft to carry out video and cellphone surveillance violates the constitutional rights of US citizens.

    • Members of Congress Look to Probe FBI’s Use of Spy Planes

      Members of Congress are demanding that the FBI turn over more information about its use of airplanes to conduct surveillance of Americans.

      The FBI is using at least 50 planes to conduct surveillance operations over U.S. cities and rural areas, the Associated Press reported earlier this week. The planes, registered under fake company names, are equipped with high-tech cameras and, in some circumstances, technology that can track thousands of cell phones below.

    • FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities
    • CIA ‘Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny’ It Has Files Related To John Lennon’s First Wife

      Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI and CIA for the records of Cynthia Lennon, who died in April after a short battle with cancer, yielded exactly two pages of results, yet still somehow spoke volumes.

      The FBI, which hosted voluminous files on John, replied that it had nothing on Cynthia, and refused to confirm (or deny) if she was on any sort of watch list before she died.

    • Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war

      Using somewhat subjective definitions of “at war” — Korea counts but Kosovo doesn’t in our analysis, for example — we endeavored to figure out how much of each person’s life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.

    • First on CNN: Pentagon may have received shipment of live anthrax
    • Jihadists in the service of imperialism

      Western governments no longer hide the fact that they’re using jihadists…

    • London Shows Solidarity with Venezuela Against US Intervention

      The rally was attended by several key figures in Britain, including Jeremy Corbyn, a parliamentarian running to lead the U.K’s Labour Party

    • Podcast: ‘Sudden Justice’ author Chris Woods on CIA accountability and the politics of US drone wars

      Transferring control of the US drone programme away from the CIA could paradoxically result in less accountability, author and investigative journalist Chris Woods told this week’s Drone News.

    • SEAL Team 6, the CIA and the secret history of U.S. kill missions in Afghanistan
    • The Secret History of SEAL Team 6: Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines
    • CIA ties to Forest Service smokejumpers documented in new account

      It recounts more than a decade of CIA efforts to support Tibetan resistance movements against the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s.

    • “The Hegemony Games”: the United States of America (USA) vs. The People’s Republic of China (PRC)

      This relationship between Washington and Beijing has existed somewhat uneasily since the early 1970s after the PRC broke with the Soviet Union mainly over intense ideological differences within the communist movement. In effect the Communist Party of China (CPC) joined with capitalist America in an informal tacit alliance against Russia. This was a geopolitical triumph for the U.S. but not for China. In the last couple of years Beijing and Moscow have developed a close relationship, largely as a repost to Washington’s expressions of hostility toward both countries.

      China was considered a revolutionary communist country from the 1949 revolution until the deaths of party leader Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai in 1976. The left wing of the CPC was then crushed, and the leadership in 1977 went to “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping, a long time revolutionary and high government official in many posts who had earlier been purged twice “for taking the capitalist road.”

      Deng set about in 1980 to develop a dynamic capitalist economy under the slogan of “using capitalism to build socialism.” By 1990, after the U.S. and others imposed sanctions against China for the Tiananmen Square confrontation with students seeking certain democratic changes, Deng issued the following instruction to the CPC: “Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.”

      The Chinese economy after 35 years is one of the wonders of the capitalist world, particularly since it is still maintained by the CPC, as are all other aspects of Chinese society. The PRC’s political system is officially described as being “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” though the socialist aspect has been abridged.

    • CIA list no secret anymore

      Last week, the National Smokejumpers Association released a list of former jumpers who served in the dangerous activities of the CIA in what were once secret U.S. government operations.

    • Iraq War Propaganda Redux: U.S. Claims Syrian Government Supporting ISIS

      In any event, whether or not you believe the West created ISIS, the U.S. is now trying to blame the single most unlikely entity imaginable for ISIS … the Syrian government.

    • The DOJ is worried the CIA’s top watchdog position will be vacant forever

      The Justice Department is worried that the office of the CIA’s top watchdog could be left vacant for a year, or possibly longer.

      The previous inspector general for the CIA resigned in late January after it was revealed that the spy agency hacked into computers used by Senate staffers right under his nose. The position is still empty. “Far too often, the process for selection and appointment of IG candidates takes too long,” complained Michael E. Horowitz, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, in a statement today to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

      “As of today, there are eight IG positions that remain vacant,” he said, urging senators to confirm presidential appointees faster. “As of the end of this month, all of these IG positions, with the exception of the CIA IG position, will have been vacant for over 1 year.”

    • Problematic case against ex-CIA chief, drones, moved to FATA?

      The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has issued a notice to the federation and summoned all records of the transfer of an investigation against former CIA chief, and drones, was moved to FATA.

    • CIA and Chevron against President of Ecuador

      The President of Ecuador Rafael Correa praised the book The CIA Against Latin America – Special Case – Ecuador. Over 30,000 copies are in circulation. Written by Jaime Galarza Zavala and Francisco Herrera Aráuz the book tells a story about the dirty tricks the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was engaged in during the 1960s in Ecuador. The authors offer interviews with Phillip Agee recorded at different times. Agee was a retired CIA operative who turned against the Agency.

    • Declassified document says Posada Carriles likely planned 1976 bombing of Cuban plane

      A 1976 document declassified Wednesday by the State Department shows concerns about the CIA’s links with extremist groups within the Cuban exile community and points to Luis Posada Carriles as the most likely planner of the bombing attack against a Cubana Airlines plane that year.

      The memorandum was sent to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by two high ranking State Department officials who evaluated the accusations made by Fidel Castro on the alleged U.S. involvement in the downing of a Cubana plane traveling out of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976, in which 73 people were killed.

      “We have now pursued in detail with CIA (1) what we know about responsibility for the sabotage of the Cubana airliner and (2) how any actions by CIA, FBI, or Defense attache´s might relate to the individuals or groups alleged to have responsibility,” states the report.

      The memorandum concludes that the CIA had previous ties to three of the people “supposedly” involved in the downing of a Cuban airliner, “but any role that these people may have had with the demolition took place without the knowledge of the CIA.”

    • The real terrorist

      On May 29, as part of its stated intentions to improve relations with Cuba, the United States formally removed the island nation from its list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism,” even as it maintained its decades-old illegal blockade.

      For most people around the world, the fact that Cuba was on a list that should not even exist represents a high in imperialist arrogance and hypocrisy, coming as it does, from the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world. Over 3,000 Cubans have been killed in U.S.-sponsored terror attacks since 1959, while the perpetrator of a terrorist bombing that brought down a Cuban airliner walks around freely in the United States.

    • US was state sponsor of terror against Cuba

      On May 29, the United States removed Cuba from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism” as one more step toward normalization of relations between the two countries. But, historically, it is the United States that has sponsored terrorism against Cuba.

      The U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror dates back to the early 1980s due to Cuban support of guerrilla movements in Central America. The label was ironic, since the United States engaged in a program of extralegal paramilitary operations as part of failed attempts at Cuban regime change all through the early 1960s. These efforts included the Bay of Pigs invasion, scores of assassination attempts against Cuban leaders and years of covert operations.

    • The Truth Teller

      While at the time I vehemently opposed his conclusions that Iraq was free of WMD, some of his arguments resonated.

    • Oops … US Air Force nearly bombed “Friendly” Iraqi Forces instead of ISIS Terrorists, General

      A top US military commander has revealed that the US-led airstrikes nearly targeted Iraqi forces instead of terrorists of the ISIL group.

      Lt. Gen. John Hesterman, the US commander of the air campaign in Iraq, said on Friday that aircraft nearly launched airstrikes 100 times on friendly Iraqi forces because they were indistinguishable from ISIL from the air, Stars and Stripes reported.

    • US drone attack kills 9 terrorists in Pakistan

      The exact identities were not known but initial reports suggested that all those killed were Afghan Taliban rebels.

    • Guantánamo detainees also can’t eat with Red Cross

      Guantánamo prison management has expanded its rule forbidding dining with detainees to include Red Cross meetings and other legal visits, a continuing change in policy that began with a ban on defense lawyers breaking bread with their clients.

    • Hamid Karzai strongly condemns deadly US drone strike in Khost

      The former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned a deadly US drone strike in southeastern Khost province of Afghanistan.

    • Hamid Karzai Strongly Condemns Deadly US Drone Strike in Afganistan

      The former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned a deadly US drone strike in southeastern Khost province of Afghanistan.

    • Intelligence Agencies Need to Knock Off the Fearmongering

      The U.S. intelligence community needs to take steps to maximize effectiveness and knock off the fearmongering — whether that means eliminating redundant roles or positions, firing and replacing incompetents, re-establishing operational boundaries, or reaffirming priorities that aren’t vulnerable to the media cycle and assorted whims.

      All the hyperventilation does little more than lend credence to Snowden’s claims of misplaced priorities and resources in the intelligence community. Americans deserve to have the quietly confident security services that they’ve paid for, without the endless opportunistic public posturing.

    • US portrays foes stronger than they are because it needs an enemy – political analyst

      If you listened to some of the politicians in the United States, you would think that the country is encircled by enemies. Grave threats emerge regularly, posing danger to everything the US has ever stood for. Islamic State is portrayed as the immediate peril for Washington – and yet, before it, Al-Qaeda was painted the same. However, the United States remain the safest country in the world – and yet, it’s not too eager to cut back on its gigantic military budget. Are the dangers that Washington sees even real, or is the threat coming from White House cabinets? We pose these questions to a professor of political science: Christopher Fettweis is on Sophie&Co today.

    • ‘Killer robots’ mean crimes without accountability

      Such fully autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” are under development in several countries. But the robots’ use of force would undermine the fundamental legal and moral principle that people should be held responsible for their wrongdoing. Countries and nongovernmental groups around the world have been working for two years now to figure out how to deal with these weapons before they are in production. In April, representatives from 90 countries met at the United Nations in Geneva for their second round of talks on what to do about “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”

    • Local TV Ads Urge Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station Drone Pilots to “Refuse of Fly”

      Fifteen-second television commercials condemning United States drone attacks will begin airing in Niagara Falls and Western New York on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, TWNS, and on YES Network during Yankees games during the month of June.

      The commercials show images from video screens of drone operations; an explosion; and civilians searching through rubble after a drone attack; and states: “Thousands, including women and children, have been murdered by US Drones.”

    • US Drones Attack Afghanistan Funeral, Killing 34 Mourners

      On Friday, US drones attacked a funeral in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, tearing through a crowd of mourners and leaving at least 34 of them dead. The funeral was reportedly for a Taliban fighter, and the Afghan government insisted that by extension, all the mourners must’ve been Taliban too.

    • U.S. drone attack kills at least 34 at Afghan Taliban funeral
    • Afghanistan: US drone strike on funeral kills 34

      At least 34 Taliban insurgents have been killed in Afghanistan’s southeastern Khost province in a U.S. drone attacked a funeral ceremony held for a slain Taliban commander Friday, Afghan authorities said.

    • US drone attack on funeral kills 34 in east Afghanistan
    • US drone operators kill for fun: Analyst
    • Report: Drone Strikes Kill Dozens in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen in May

      American drone strikes killed roughly 50 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan in Yemen in May, according to a Tuesday report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ).

    • Monthly drone report, May 2015: US strikes kill at least 48 in three countries
    • Air Force reacts as Hollywood, Broadway portray drone pilots

      The Air Force has gone on the offensive in an attempt to dispel what it calls myths about the community of remotely piloted aircraft pilots as Hollywood and Broadway both have produced works highlighting the lives of drone pilots.

      With the release of the Ethan Hawke movie “Good Kill” and the recent Anne Hathaway play “Grounded,” the Air Force has sent RPA pilots and commanders into the public to try to tell the real story of the airmen who operate the aircraft.

    • Drone strikes equal collateral massacre

      What does drone warfare say about the direction our country is headed in? I believe it’s a broader symptom of how quickly we resort to violence. Someone is a threat? Shoot ’em. Someone looks like they might be a threat? Shoot them, too. It’s no different than how the police in our country deal with black men — use extreme force. Maybe it’s time we wake up, slap ourselves upside the soul, and ask how we can ever hope to achieve a durable peace by sitting at computers and “unintentionally” killing people thousands of miles away with Hellfire missiles.

      We might be destroying our enemies, but the fallout from the “collateral massacre” will impact us for years to come.

    • Drone policy will come back to bite U.S.

      The entire “kingpin strategy” first used during the “drug wars” to kill high value individuals, has backfired. After cartel leaders were eliminated, more ruthless groups took over, competition flourished and drug prices declined. Taking out kingpins actually increased supply. In fact, America’s addiction to illicit drugs increased due to this failed strategy.

    • Near certainty of targeted drone attacks sows death for an apology

      Scenes in which Muslim civilians are deliberately killed in a cold-blooded and ruthless manner, being regarded as “collateral damage,” and in which the order to fire is given directly given by the CIA are particularly striking. CIA administrators collecting intelligence about the location of terrorists in the region are linked up to the military base in Las Vegas from Langley and watch the images sent back by the UAVs in real time. When the image of the target appears, the officers are able to give the order to fire disregarding warnings that ‘women, children or elderly people’ are also present in the terrorists’ location.

    • Dead Syrian Children And Drones On The Wing

      Recently the Pentagon admitted to killing two Syrian children in a drone attack last fall when they bombed a group of al Qaeda fighters in the suburbs of the Syrian city of Aleppo. At the time they claimed this group was a critical target because they were high level operatives associated with Al Qaeda who were planning attacks on the United States mainland.. No one that I know had ever heard of this group, but their name, Khorasan, is the name of a province in Iran, which is an odd choice for an Al Qaeda affiliate. So they bombed this small group of 50 or less foreigners, holed up in a suburb of Aleppo, Syria, in a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a war zone, plotting to kill Americans in America. It is a stretch to to wrap the mind around this rather incredible story.

    • Interfaith Letter Expressing Grave Concerns on Drone Warfare Sent to President Obama and Congress

      Twenty-nine faith leaders from Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh traditions have sent an Interfaith Letter on Drone Warfare to President Barak Obama and the U.S. Congress.

      The signers say it is morally unacceptable that thousands of innocent people have been killed by US lethal drone strikes. The letter also raises concerns that targeted killings by drones lack transparency and accountability. Finally the letter argues that drone strikes do not make Americans safer, but rather aid recruitment by extremist groups.

    • Faith leaders oppose drone attacks

      Roy Medley, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches USA, and Carole Collins, director of finance and operations for the Alliance of Baptists, were among signers of the letter coordinated by the Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare, a group of 150 faith leaders formed at a recent conference on drone warfare at Princeton Theological Seminary.

      Thousands of deaths, both intended and unintended, have resulted from the military use of lethal drones technology, the faith leaders maintained. One, the recent death of Warren Weinstein, a U.S. citizen killed accidently in a counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan, they said, illustrated the risk of drone warfare.

      “Despite the prevailing notion that drones are precise, the recent tragedy involving the death of a U.S. citizen demonstrates this is not the case,” the letter said. “Indeed, such tragedies seem to happen frequently.”

      Reports of a secret “kill list” containing potential drone strike targets created and maintained by the Obama administration, the religious leaders said, “are alarming to us, and counter to our notions of human dignity, participatory processes and rule of law.”

      The faith leaders voiced concern about secrecy and lack of accountability surrounding targeted drone strikes and disputed the assumption that drones save American lives.

    • Protestors to Falls air base: stop deadly drone attacks

      A small group of protestors lined up outside the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station on Wednesday. They were speaking out against the use of drones by the U.S. military, flown overseas and used in attacks while operated from domestic sites including the local air base.

      The protestors, nearly ten in all, included a Vietnam Veteran and a clergyman. The veteran was Russell Brown, who served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. He said President Obama and Congress won’t stop military actions overseas, so it’s time to reach out to those in control of the drones.

    • The Turf War Launched by America’s First Drone Strike Is Still Raging

      The CIA’s then-secret weapon missed the Taliban’s leader, starting a 14-years-and-counting fight over who controls the U.S. drone program.

    • Man Whose Son Was Killed In Afghanistan Surprises Pro-War Senator

      During a foreign policy talk at John’s Hopkins University Friday, the father of a man killed in Afghanistan railed against Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for his pro-war posturing.

    • Lindsey Graham is the bluntest candidate for president

      In recent months, he’s suggested that U.S. elections are controlled behind the scenes by a cabal of a few dozen wealthy donors. He’s implied that the president has the authority to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil using drones without judicial process, and that the military should invade Syria.

    • The age of human rights imperialism

      The timing was surprising because there have hardly been incidents of human rights abuse in Rwanda for a while. Instead the hearing took place against the backdrop of widespread demonstrations in the US against police brutality meted out against African American males.

      Why would the US congress be bothered by human rights in Rwanda, a country 15,000 miles away, when many of its own citizens are being killed by a run-amok police while others are being sent to jail in droves? In the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s, the government of Rwanda used to be highhanded. It relied on the systematic use of force to consolidate power to a significant degree.

    • Kenya fight against Shebab shifts to its own backyard

      “The Somalia theatre is no longer of interest to the Shebab,” a Western security source told AFP.

    • This is the bloodiest conflict no one is talking about

      I came to know Okot years ago when I looked after him and dozens of other kids at a home for orphans in South Sudan. He was hardened by the time we met, thin as one of the papyrus reeds that grows along the Nile River, and smarter than just about anyone else, child or adult, whom I encountered during my first months in one of the poorest places on earth.

    • Roger That: Scientists find link between bomb blasts, aging of soldiers’ brains

      U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs scientists have discovered signs of early aging in the brains of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans exposed to roadside bomb explosions, even among those who felt nothing from the blast, according to a story in USA Today.

    • John Cusack says Obama is worse than Bush. But he’s just a guy with a boombox.

      You can add actor John Cusack to the list of liberals unimpressed by President Obama’s time in office.

      In an interview with the Daily Beast published Thursday, Cusack said Obama is “as bad or worse than Bush” when it comes to “drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers.”

    • Is Obama Really Worse Than Bush?

      Yet the extensive spying program and invasive military excursions are following the same strategies and policy narratives that have prevailed in the United States for decades. The point is not which president is better or worse than the other, but rather that these same “Big Brother”, imperialist and Wall Street-kissing policies remain the driving status quo in American presidential politics. Obama and Bush are merely figureheads governing a system that caters to corporations, terrified enough by terrorism to strip the American public of their privacy and secure its world power status through unnecessary and exploitative foreign invasions. Obama ran a campaign of change and “hope”, but change cannot happen with one leader, rather when the problems inherent in our system are eradicated, when those underlying systemic forces are reversed, then change within the American political system can finally have freedom to flourish.

    • John Cusack Talks ‘Love & Mercy,’ Drugs & How Obama’s Policies Are ‘Very Similar to Bush’

      “Well, Obama has certainly extended and hardened the cement on a lot of Bush’s post-9/11 Terror Inc. policies, so he’s very similar to Bush in every way that way,” Cusack said. “His domestic policy is a bit different, but when you talk about drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers, he’s as bad or worse than Bush. He hasn’t started as many wars, but he’s extended the ones we had, and I don’t even think Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon would say the president has the right to unilaterally decide whom he can kill around the world. On Tuesdays, the president can just decide whom he wants to kill, and you know, since 9/11 there are magic words like ‘terror,’ and if you use magic words, you can justify any power grab you want.”

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Wikileaks publishes TiSA: A secret trade pact between US, Europe and others for big biz pals

      Fresh from offering $100,000 to anyone that leaks the still-secret parts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Wikileaks has published large chunks of the related Trade In Services Agreement (TiSA).

    • ‘They don’t work for the CIA’: Union opposes Disney rule mandating ‘character confidentiality’

      A union representing Walt Disney World performers is challenging a policy forbidding them from revealing online or in print media what characters they portray. The company has long discouraged its entertainers from advertising which princesses or animated animals they play in the theme parks.

    • The Deck Is Stacked Against the Public’s Right to Know

      This week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform devoted two hearings to understand the state of the government’s compliance to the Freedom of Information Act. As originally intended, the act first passed in 1966 was designed to allow U.S. citizens to request government documents in order to understand what their government was doing. Think of any major Washington scandal and most likely you’ll see FOIA as the tool that uncovered that story. It was how Judicial Watch continues to gather information about the 2012 Benghazi attack and the IRS’s decision to target conservative nonprofits. The act, as wielded by journalist Jason “FIOA terrorist” Leopold, pried loose information about the inner workings of Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ‘It’s Not Just Keystone’: Midwest Gears Up for Massive Tar Sands Fight

      A large protest in Minnesota this weekend is designed to show that the resistance to tar sands goes well beyond Keystone XL, as numerous environmental and social justice groups come together with Indigenous communities across the region to make their unified demands clear to all: “keep toxic tar sands out of America’s Heartland, fight for clean water, clean energy, and a safe climate.”

    • A Fossil Fuel Free World is Possible: How to Power a Warming Earth Without Oil, Coal and Nuclear

      Is a 100% renewable energy future possible? According to Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, the answer is yes. Jacobson has developed plans for all 50 states to transform their power infrastructure to rely on wind, water and solar power. This comes as California lawmakers have approved a dozen ambitious environmental and energy bills creating new standards for energy efficiency. Dubbed the California climate leadership package, the 12 bills set high benchmarks for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum use. We speak with Jacobson and Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford University Associate Professor and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

    • Gelderland uses ‘neck breaker’ to kill geese at EUR 13.50 a bird

      Gelderland provincial council has given a EUR 22,000 contract to a small pest control company to kill 1,600 geese using a controversial method of breaking the birds’ necks. Despite the cost of EUR 13.75 per bird, no one has seen if or how the method works and the province does not plan to check up on the work or animal welfare issues, the AD reports. The contract has been awarded to a company named V&T, based in Leerdam but details about how the neck breaker will work are sketchy.

  • Finance

    • Distorted facts, blatant lies: business group’s big push to get ISDS through

      Green MEPs Bart Staes and Molly Scott Cato today openly denounced the lobbying tactics of Mr Beyrer, Director-General of leading business advocate group BUSINESSEUROPE, over the contentious Investor-state Dispute System (ISDS) in TTIP. Both got hold of a lobby email sent by Beyrer to Mr Pittella, chairman of the S&D group as well as other S&D-members. The S&D are in expected to reintroduce anti-ISDS language into the final TTIP resolution, having lost the crucial language opposing ISDS in a compromise with the centre-right group the EPP, last week.

    • EU wants to complete talks on TTIP under Obama

      The talks about the EU-U.S. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) should be completed under U.S. President Barack Obama’s term of office, which ends in January 2017, EU Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström said at a press conference after a meeting with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka in Prague.

    • Daughter says Blatter victim of conspiracy to oust him

      The three British banks were among more than a dozen named in a 164-page indictment by the FBI but there is no allegation of any wrongdoing from the institutions.

      They are, however, understood to be reviewing the transactions as a precaution to make sure they complied with anti-money laundering and “know your customer” rules.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • At CBS, CIA + GOP = ‘All Segments of American Life’

      Hendin did mention two categories of guests that Schieffer showcased who were outside the world of Beltway politics, “sports figures and celebrities,” and mentioned three of these: Bill Cosby, Morgan Fairchild and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. So much for “all segments of American life.” Apparently there are some parts of the nation CBS doesn’t want to face.

    • How Reagan’s Propaganda Succeeded

      The U.S. political/media system is awash in propaganda drowning any rational debate about crucial foreign policy issues. But how did that happen? A key turning point was the Reagan administration’s pushback against public skepticism over Vietnam and CIA scandals of the 1970s, Robert Parry wrote in 2010.

  • Censorship

    • Chinese Censorship of Western Books Is Now Normal. Where’s the Outrage?

      I spent months investigating how Chinese publishers slice out material — and how Western writers respond with a shrug.

    • Facebook Admits ‘Baby Yoga’ Video Is Disturbing, But Resists Censorship

      A video supposedly depicting “baby yoga” started circulating around Facebook recently, causing an internet uproar and calls for the social media site to be more responsible for user content. The company eventually relented, taking down (some) posts, but the debate over social media censorship is still raging.

    • ‘Baby yoga’ video on Facebook sparks internet censorship debate

      A disturbing video of a screaming baby being roughly dunked in a bucket of water is at the centre of a row over internet censorship.

      The two-minute film appeared on Facebook and showed a woman in a kitchen, believed to be in Indonesia, repeatedly plunging a crying young baby into a vat of water while holding the child upside down and spinning it around.

      Facebook refused to take it down and the video spread around the world, with some people claiming it was an example of “baby yoga” – and child protection activists arguing it was straightforward abuse.

    • Is the New Political Correctness Already Dying?
    • Alan Yentob Calls Ofcom Censorship Plans ‘Bonkers’ And Defends The BBC To Boris Johnson

      Plans to empower Ofcom to vet and censor broadcasts for extremist content have been labelled “bonkers” by one of the BBC’s most senior and recognised personalities.

      Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director, said the proposal implied broadcasters were “reckless” and went against the tradition of freedom of speech.

    • ACLU threatens lawsuit; Alhambra Unified officials deny censorship over article

      The ACLU has threatened legal action against the Alhambra Unified School District on the heels of student journalists’ concerns that an administrator allegedly censored student journalists’ publication of an article on the dismissal of a popular high school teacher.

    • China tries to censor a disaster

      THE TRAGIC sinking of a cruise ship on the Yangtze River on Monday night produced a reflexive reaction from China’s communist authorities: censorship. Within hours of the disaster, which left more than 440 people dead or missing, authorities were scrubbing the Internet of questions or comments about the Eastern Star and its passengers. News media were ordered not to send journalists to the scene, to recall those already there and to rely on the official state news and television agencies for their information. Instead of providing detailed accounts, those outlets focused their coverage on Premier Li Keqiang, who was portrayed as resolutely leading rescue efforts.

    • Death Toll Up To 65 In China Boat Disaster; Government Orders Censorship

      As expected, the death toll from the capsizing of a cruise ship on China’s Yangtze River began rising dramatically late Wednesday, as Reuters reported that the number of bodies recovered had jumped to 65.

      More than 370 people remain missing from the ship. Rescuers have cut holes in the upturned hull of the ship and are continuing to hunt for survivors in potential air pockets, Reuters reported.

    • The Arab world has a media censorship problem, but so does the West

      As Arab citizens, we have always been surrounded by seemingly uncrossable borders and boundaries. Unless of course you have wasta—that is when you know someone that knows someone (that knows someone) who can help.

    • China cracks down further on VPNs as censorship intensifies

      China’s government is cracking down further on the use of virtual private networks to circumnavigate its Great Firewall, as part of the ongoing game of whack-a-mole between censors and an increasingly tech-savvy population.

      Charlie Smith, co-founder of the censorship in China monitoring site GreatFire.org, said there has been a significant increase in the usage of VPN services over the last year.

    • Imgur’s Sarah Schaaf Responds After NSFW Censorship Rules Are Enforced: What She Said On Twitter

      It would be an understatement to say that Imgur users — also known as “Imgurians”– freaked out when the image-based social network started to enforce censorship guidelines this week. Community manager Sarah Schaaf even received death threats over the rules, but it doesn’t mean she has given up on the Internet.

    • Vladimir Putin’s censorship agenda targets online giants

      The Russian communications oversight authority has put Facebook, Twitter and Google on notice. In May the agency, known by its acronym Roskomnadzor, sent a letter to the companies reminding them that they need to comply with the country’s Internet laws.

    • Boise State University Stops Making Pro-Life groups Post Warning Signs for Their Events

      The university also prohibited the group from distributing fliers outside one of the school’s eight “speech zones,” which together are limited to less than one percent of the entire campus.

    • How to combat hate

      As for Holocaust denial, for all its absurdity and offensiveness, criminal penalties are the wrong way to combat it, as The Economist has always argued. “In civilised countries, the truth is best policed by scholars, not criminal prosecutors,” we wrote when the British writer David Irving was convicted by an Austrian court.

    • Orthodox Academics Minimize Haredi Censorship And Marginalization Of Women
    • Saffron Censorship: Sikh24 Blocked In India As Media Outage Continues

      Indian authorities have blocked Sikh24 social media pages, including Sikh24’s Facebook page on Thursday. Users report that some internet service providers do allow the sites, while most in the north-western states, such as Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir have blocked Sikh24 completely. While still spottily enforced, the blocking has seemed to become stricter following the shooting death of a Sikh who was protesting peacefully.

    • Banned in India: My Censorship Battle

      On March 5, 2015, the Indian Censors declared that the film Unfreedom couldn’t be certified for public viewing in India. In the following satiric piece by the film’s director, Raj Amit Kumar, based on actual statements made by the Indian Censors about his film, he is questioning not just their decision about his film, but the validity of their authority to censor any film.

  • Privacy

    • Lifting the lid on modern day spies

      One thing rarely understood about espionage, as it has come to be in the 21st century, has been the shift out of the field and into the office. There aren’t may British Government employees roaming the world with false identities and licences to kill. Rather, increasingly, the desk-jockeys have been hiring people such as “Steak Knife”, Britain’s top spy inside the IRA. Our government agents are now “spymasters” who recruit or “handle” spies; they are career professionals employed by agencies such as the CIA and Britain’s SIS (also known by its one-time codename, MI6) or Military Intelligence.

    • US government responds to latest hack: give us more power over data collection

      Congressional leaders are warning the latest major government data hack proves the Senate should hand the US government greater cybersecurity powers – even as the stalled legislation to do so would place even more consumer data into the hands of the same government that could not secure its existing information.

      An estimated 4 million federal employees had their personal data compromised after what was reported by authorities on Thursday to be a previously unknown software intrusion, known as a “zero day” attack, accessed networks operated by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal human resources department that houses high-level security clearances and government employee records.

    • Latest Snowden leak: NSA can snoop internet to catch ‘hackers’ – no warrants needed

      The latest documents to be released from the Snowden archive show that the NSA was secretly authorized to carry out warrantless surveillance on US internet traffic in the name of cybersecurity.

      Two memos released by ProPublica in cooperation with The New York Times show that in May 2012, the US Justice Department authorized the NSA to monitor domestic internet traffic as part of investigations into foreign hacking attacks. That authority was later extended to allow monitoring of IP addresses and “cybersignatures.”

    • Private emails, trade secrets vulnerable to expanded NSA Internet spying

      The US government has the power to gather a vast amount of information from American citizens, including those from private emails, after the National Security Agency (NSA) expanded its Internet surveillance efforts in 2012, without public notice or consultations.

    • NSA’s use of ‘back-door searches’ against hackers is reformers’ next target

      Surveillance reformers, fresh off a week of tenuous victories, have vowed to ensure there are further overhauls to the National Security Agency’s vast dragnets after a new report detailed another stretch of legal authority by the US government to stop malicious hackers.

    • Edward Snowden: NSA secretly had spying powers expanded under Obama administration

      New documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden claim the US National Security Agency had its power to spy on US internet connections secretly expanded under the Obama administration.

    • New Snowden Documents Reveal Secret Memos Expanding Spying

      The Obama administration has stepped up the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program on U.S. soil to search for signs of hacking.

    • The NSA is still conducting mass surveillance of the US internet to find cyberattacks
    • New Snowden documents reveal secret memos expanding spying

      Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents.

      In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad—including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

    • Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border
    • NSA surveillance: how librarians have been on the front line to protect privacy

      ‘Librarians were the original search engine’ and long before Edward Snowden, thousands campaigned against the government violating privacy rights

    • Snowden: balance of power has shifted as people defy government surveillance

      A “profound difference” has occurred over the past two years, following the leaking of NSA documents that led to revelations about US surveillance on phone and internet communications, whistleblower Edward Snowden has said.

    • New Snowden leak: NSA uses warrantless Web surveillance to hunt hackers

      According to a joint investigation between the New York Times and Pro Publica, the Justice Department authorized the NSA to hunt for hackers without a warrant, even when those hackers were present on American soil. Initially, the DOJ authorized the NSA to gather only addresses and “cybersignatures” that corresponded to computer intrusions, so that it could tie the efforts to specific foreign governments. The NSA, however, sought permission to push this envelope. These new slides also note, incidentally, that Dropbox was targeted for addition to the PRISM program.

    • Don’t expect major changes to NSA surveillance from Congress

      After the U.S. Congress approved what critics have called modest limits on the National Security Agency’s collection of domestic telephone records, many lawmakers may be reluctant to further change the government’s surveillance programs.

    • NSA reform: USA Freedom Act passes first surveillance reform in decade – as it happened
    • NSA can’t legally surveil Americans’ every phone call, for now. Thanks, Edward Snowden.

      Today is a big day for privacy in the United States: each of us can now call our mom, our best friend, or a pizza delivery service without the NSA automatically keeping a record of who we called, when, and how long the conversation lasts.

    • Edward Snowden: Becoming an ‘international fugitive’ was worth it, claims NSA whistleblower

      Becoming an “international fugitive” was worth it because of the benefits it brought to the public, according to US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

      The former National Security Agency (NSA) worker said progress had been made since he released thousands of documents about global surveillance records two years ago.

    • How The NSA’s ‘Cybersecurity’ Surveillance Should Completely Change The Debate On Cybersecurity Bills

      For quite some time now, we’ve been warning about the government’s questionable attempts to pass “cybersecurity” bills that focus on “information sharing” with names like CISA and CISPA. Defenders of these bills insist that they’re “just voluntary” and are necessary because it would enable private companies to share threat information with the US government, so that the US government could help stop attacks. Of course, we’ve been asking for years (1) why, if this is so useful, companies can’t already share this information and (2) what attacks these bills would have actually stopped? No one ever seems to have any answers.

    • With the Passage of NSA Reforms, Telecoms Say the Buck Has Been Passed to Them

      The two-year fight to overhaul the National Security Agency ended this week with President Barack Obama’s signing of the USA Freedom Act. But it will take months of tough negotiations with telecom companies for the White House to actually implement the required reforms, and privacy groups are still smarting over what they consider watered-down changes to how the NSA does business.

    • New conservative legal challenge to NSA phone data program

      Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the tea party-linked Freedom Works Foundation filed a legal motion Friday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking to stop the government from restarting the program run formerly by the National Security Agency. The previous program expired June 1, along with certain authorities under the Patriot Act.

    • NSA phone data program beset by new legal challenge

      Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the tea party-linked Freedom Works Foundation filed a legal motion Friday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking to stop the government from restarting the program run formerly by the National Security Agency. The previous program expired Monday, along with certain authorities under the Patriot Act.

    • NSA quietly expanded Internet snooping powers, leaked documents show

      A new joint report from the New York Times and ProPublica that cites classified documents reveals that the Obama administration secretly granted the National Security Agency additional authorities to spy on the international Internet communications of Americans in order to seek out hacking attacks from abroad. The expanded powers, which aimed to help the agency seek out and squelch foreign-born cyber intrusions, had not been previously disclosed to the public.

    • This Shadow Government Agency Is Scarier Than the NSA

      If you have a telephone number that has ever been called by an inmate in a federal prison, registered a change of address with the Postal Service, rented a car from Avis, used a corporate or Sears credit card, applied for nonprofit status with the IRS, or obtained non-driver’s legal identification from a private company, they have you on file.

    • Nosier than the NSA? Shadowy bureau may have your credit card info
    • Shadow branch of US Justice Department more secretive and powerful than NSA

      This agency is called the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC). This is a shadow branch of the US Justice Department. The agency employs more than 400 people, of whom 300 are analysts and has the annual budget of more than $150 million.

    • Locals react to reformed NSA surveillance bill
    • Local Reaction to NSA Surveillance Reform
    • US Officials to Ask Secret Court to Bring Back NSA Spying
    • EFF and ACLU Ask Appeals Court to Rule that Use of NSA’s Warrantless Surveillance in a Criminal Case Is Unconstitutional

      With the passage of the USA Freedom Act, we’ve gained important reforms of the intelligence community, but there’s still a lot to do, including reining in the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance of Americans’ Internet communications under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). That’s why EFF yesterday filed an amicus brief along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Oregon in United States v. Mohamud, a criminal case currently on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit involving Section 702 surveillance.

    • Report: NSA Expanded Internet Spying

      Two secret Justice Department memos, written in mid-2012, deemed as legal the search of Internet communications, without warrants and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions emanating from abroad, including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the publications reported on June 4, citing the Snowden documents leaked two years ago.

    • Four million federal employee records hacked. Is the NSA actually capable of preventing cyber-attacks?

      So what did the NSA or any of our other intelligence agencies do to stop any of those attacks?

      It doesn’t look like they actually did anything.

      I suppose one could hypothesize that the NSA did detect some of these attacks but decided not to do anything because it would confirm to the world that the NSA was poking their noses in places that they shouldn’t have been. But the entire world already know the NSA breaks U.S. and international laws on a daily basis so it’s not like it would surprise anyone.

    • Satire: N.S.A. Compensates for Loss of Surveillance Powers by Logging on to Facebook
    • US lawmaker: Next, we stop the NSA from weakening encryption

      Encryption should stay strong, says one privacy-minded member of Congress.

    • NSA spying powers aren’t dead yet, as the Obama administration seeks to revive bulk collection

      Not more than 72-hours after the NSA’s controversial bulk phone records collection program was brought to an end on Sunday night, the Obama administration has confirmed it will seek to temporarily reinstate the operation through a provision found in the USA Freedom Act.

      By exploiting a six-month transitional grace period afforded to the NSA in the freshly-passed Act, the administration says it will petition a secret surveillance court to revive the program while its data and repositories are prepped to transfer from the servers in Fort Meade to the hands of US telecoms.

    • Encryption mobile app ‘can’t be broken by the NSA’

      A smartphone app going live this month claims to be the ‘dark Internet tunnel’ that thwarts snooping on calls and texts.

    • New privacy app takes a page from NSA technology
    • USMobile launches Scrambl3 mobile app that creates ‘Dark Internet Tunnel’
    • Snowden: UK has ‘exploited tragedy’ to justify spying on civilians
    • Martin O’Malley Calls For More Restrictions on NSA Surveillance

      Former Gov. Martin O’Malley said that recent reforms to the Patriot Act did not go far enough in curtailing the National Security Agency, arguing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court should include a public advocate.

    • Edward Snowden looks back, two years after NSA leaks started

      It’s been about two years since we first discussed the NSA plan for “bulk metadata” monitoring of phone calls. At the heart of that information and so many revelations since, is Edward Snowden, the man who leaked documents to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras about exactly what was being done in the name of national security. Still living in Russia to avoid prosecution for that act, he’s published an op-ed in The New York Times, titled “The World Says No to Surveillance.”

    • Merkel says government didn’t lie about possible US ‘no-spy’ pact
    • Judge probes destruction of evidence in NSA leak prosecution

      A federal judge is investigating allegations that the government may have improperly destroyed documents during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake.

    • Federal judge probes destruction of evidence in prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake

      A federal judge is investigating charges that the United States government may have illegally destroyed possible evidence during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake.

      McClatchy reports that U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie Gallagher launched her inquiry after Drake’s lawyers in April accused the Pentagon inspector general’s office of destroying documents during Drake’s criminal prosecution. The case against Drake ended almost four years ago.

    • Feds Under Investigation for Destroying Evidence in NSA Whistleblower Case

      The United States government is under investigation following allegations that the Pentagon inspector general’s office destroyed documents during the investigation of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake.

      Lawyers for Drake, including Jesselyn Radack, made the accusation in April. They allege that the government improperly destroyed documents relating to Drake’s work with a group of whistleblowers from 2002-2003, who legally cooperated with congressional and inspector general inquiries relating to NSA programs.

    • Former Pentagon IG Official Probed for Destroying Documents

      Halbrooks did not respond to messages, and the Pentagon IG’s office declined to comment. The Justice Department also gave no comment on the current judicial probe.

      [...]

      Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, told Government Executive that “Drake and the other NSA surveillance whistleblowers followed all the rules and worked within the system, to a letter. But the Pentagon inspector general responded by violating their rights, referring them for criminal investigations and beginning nightmares that devastated Mr. Drake’s and others’ lives.”

    • Daniel Ellsberg credits Edward Snowden with catalysing US surveillance reform

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be thanked for sparking the debate that forced Congress to change US surveillance law, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said Monday.

    • NSA spying: Today in America our government keeps us neither free nor safe
    • Neither Freedom nor Safety: Politicians are Lying to You on NSA Spying

      In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. And they have dispatched and re-dispatched 60,000 federal agents to intercept the telephone calls, text messages and emails of all Americans all the time.

      [...]

      The NSA is a military entity that utilizes the services of military computer experts and agents, employs civilians, and hires companies that provide thousands of outside contractors. After nearly 14 years of spying on us — all authorized by a secret court whose judges cannot keep records of what they have ordered or discuss openly what they know — the NSA now has computers and computer personnel physically located in the main switching offices of all telecom and Internet service providers in the United States. It has 24/7 access to the content of everyone’s telephone calls, emails and text messages.

    • How the NSA Tramples Freedom and Undermines Public Safety
    • Obama Administration to Ask Secret Court to Revive NSA Surveillance

      The Guardian on Wednesday reported that the Obama administration “intends to use part of a law banning the bulk collection of US phone records to temporarily restart the bulk collection of US phone records.”

    • Back from the dead: US officials to ask secret court to revive NSA surveillance

      Obama administration sees unconventional legal circumstance as means to temporarily reinstate bulk collection using same law that banned practice

    • Under New Rules, NSA To Again Access Americans’ Phone Records

      The National Security Agency can once again access your phone records. That power lapsed for almost two days. It is back under new rules. Data about calls can only be stored by phone companies, and the government will need a court order to get it. It’s a system laid out in a congressional bill that the House passed weeks ago. The Senate approved it yesterday after days of delay. Here’s NPR’s Ailsa Chang.

    • Analysis: New NSA bill barely touches agency’s vast powers

      The surveillance law enacted this week stands as the most significant curb on the government’s investigative authorities since the 1970s. But it’s practically inconsequential in the universe of the National Security Agency’s vast digital spying operations, a technical overhaul of a marginal counterterrorism program that some NSA officials wanted to jettison anyway.

    • Judge probes claim of evidence destruction in NSA leak prosecution

      A federal judge is investigating allegations that the government may have improperly destroyed documents during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake.

    • Pentagon may have destroyed evidence in NSA whistleblower case, now under investigation

      A federal judge is investigating allegations that the US government may have destroyed documents during the investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake, who leaked information about the agency’s surveillance programs.

    • Encrypted email: ‘Indicator for NSA to collect that information’

      It’s established fact at this point in time that the NSA has conspired with a number of the largest providers of social networking to extract information for use in on-going investigations. The real question is we don’t know the extent to which that is happening. What we do know, however, is that buried in this US Freedom Act are several clauses – one of which will pay private companies to collect information about its users, and a second that provides liability protection even if sharing that information is found by a court to have been illegal. So one of the reasons why a lot of companies are right now pushing for the passage of the US Freedom Act is that they get money and they get liability protection if what they are doing actually breaks the law.

    • Don’t expect NSA reform to matter as long as there’s still a war on drugs

      Before the war on terror was born, there was the war on drugs — and despite the recent erosion in punitive drug laws across the US, the federal war on drugs is still expanding. USA Today reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted 11,681 electronic intercepts in 2014, up from 3,394 just a decade earlier. This sharp increase has been made possible, USA Today reports, because the DEA has circumvented federal judges in favor of state courts that may have less rigorous requirements for obtaining warrants.

    • Needles, Haystacks, and NSA Snooping

      “Section 215 helps us find a needle in the haystack,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last month, referring to the PATRIOT Act provision that the National Security Agency (NSA) says allows it to scoop up everyone’s telephone records. If Congress imposes limits aimed at preventing such mass snooping, the Kentucky Republican warned, “there might not be a haystack at all.”

      For those who wonder how McConnell lost his battle to renew Section 215 without changes, a plausible answer is that he and his allies picked the wrong metaphor. What they meant to say (I think) was that the NSA needs all the help it can get in the challenging task of identifying terrorists before they attack. What the public heard was a defense of indiscriminate and invasive yet ineffective data collection.

    • Solution Providers: New NSA Controls Fall Short Of Restoring Trust In Cloud Services

      While Congress took steps Tuesday to curtail unbridled government surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), solution providers said the efforts fall short of restoring damaged client trust in cloud services.

      The U.S. Senate voted 67-32 on Tuesday to pass a bill proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives, known as the U.S.A. Freedom Act, that would reinstate surveillance but provided for more controls, such as requiring a warrant for records stored at phone companies such as Verizon or Comcast. The bill is a replacement to the controversial Patriot Act, which expired Monday.

    • An Interview with PH1K3 the #NSA Email #Hacker

      “Alleged” NSA email hacker, that is, although he seems plenty eager to discuss it publicly. On May 15, we brought you the exclusive story of a hack of the NSA’s backup email server, a server maintained, ironically, not by the NSA but by Qwest, an IT services company against which the NSA had previously battled (spoiler: the NSA won). Back then, a softer, gentler age mere months before 9/11, the NSA wanted permission to access your data, and it asked Qwest for that permission. Qwest refused. The NSA pressed the issue, soon armed with the newly-minted Patriot Act. Qwest’s federal contracts began to dry up as it continued to resist the fond embraces of the NSA. Four years later its CEO was sentenced to prison for insider trading, which he considers to be no coincidence.

    • US ‘freezes intelligence cooperation with German troops in Iraq’

      Despite the diplomatic fallout over NSA spying, it has emerged in recent months that Germany’s own BND intelligence service spied on European targets – at the NSA’s request.

    • Bergen: NSA fishing expedition nets a minnow

      The reality is that the NSA’s surveillance has proven far less effective than traditional investigative methods. More than half of the 294 cases that New America examined were initiated by such techniques as reliance on tips from members of a suspect’s community or family, tips from suspicious members of the public, the use of informants, routine law enforcement, intelligence from sources other than the NSA, or followup after a militant made a public statement regarding their extremist beliefs or actions.

    • NSA metadata collection targets innocent people

      US lawmakers are battling over how far its spy agencies can go to collect Americans’ phone records and other data after controversial parts of the Patriot Act expired at midnight on Sunday.

      [...]

      Opponents of the law seem to have run out of options and the new law is expected to pass sometime this week, though the debate will probably continue as the US heads into a presidential election.

    • Snowden: NSA spies on Cameron; could have ‘backdoor’ into GCHQ

      Whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticized the UK for playing an active role in the worldwide surveillance network set up by the US National Security Agency (NSA), saying the rights and needs of British citizens are being sacrificed.

    • Critic: NSA on a “very ugly path”

      After 30-plus years as an official in the National Security Agency (NSA), William Binney has been speaking out about what he sees as the “very ugly path” his former employer, along with the FBI and CIA, are currently following.

      At a lunch presentation on April 29 in midtown New York, Binney didn’t hold back detailing the extent of the surveillance as well as the workarounds the agencies use to gather data and apply it in prosecutions. And the practices will only get bigger, Binney said, owing to the money flowing into the departments based on lies being told to Congress and an uninformed public.

    • Bernie Sanders Reluctantly Admits He Agrees With Rand Paul On NSA Surveillance

      Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) may be on opposite sides of the aisle, but they do see eye to eye on the issue of government surveillance.

    • Katie Couric to Bernie Sanders: Aren’t You and Rand Paul in ‘Lockstep’ on NSA?
    • Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul agree: The NSA goes too far

      Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul may not have much in common. But there is one thing the Vermont socialist and Kentucky libertarian agree on: the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

      In an interview with Katie Couric for Yahoo News on Monday, Sanders said “in many respects” he agrees with Paul when it comes to opposing the government’s collection of people’s phone records.

    • Florida Schools Tracking Kids on Social Media NSA-Style

      One thing Orange schools are doing right is being honest about using this program. Orange County might not be the first school system to use this surveillance device, but the software company is unwilling to disclose who else is using it. Certainly, it’s at least better to tell students and their parents up front that social media messages posted at school will be monitored rather than doing it without their knowledge.

    • Former NSA Director: Freedom Act Vote is Approval for Bulk Data Collection

      Former NSA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the US Congress cast a vote of approval for the National Security Agency’s ability to collect US citizen’s metadata.

    • Former NSA Director: NSA Lost Only Access to US Phone Records on Monday

      Former NSA Director Michael Hayden claims that the NSA bulk data collection authority, which expired on Monday, was the sole mechanism the agency had for accessing US citizens’ phone data.

    • Argentine President met with NSA whistleblower while in Moscow

      Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez held talks with U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden during a visit to Russia in April. The two hour-long meeting took place after intelligence documents provided by Snowden, revealed Britain spied on Argentine military and political leaders from 2006 to 2011.

    • Lawyer: Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez took meeting with Snowden
    • Bruce Plante Cartoon: NSA under control
    • US Telecom Giants Cooperate Eagerly With NSA in Surveillance – Watchdog

      Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn said that the major American telecommunications companies will continue to cooperate eagerly with the US government and carry out its wishes just as during the past 14 years.

    • Does The NSA Spy On Messaging Apps?

      The surveillance methods under review in Congress only involve phone records. National security expert Richard Clarke, who recently served on President Obama’s task force that recommended changes on NSA surveillance programs, told Here & Now host Jeremy Hobson that messages sent over apps like WhatsApp, iMessage and Facetime cannot be deciphered by the government.

    • UK police outdoes USA’s NSA accessing people’s personal information every two minutes

      As many as 93 percent of such police requests are approved. The number of data requests peaked in 2014 with 250,000 requests in total.

    • FBI’s Flights Monitor Citizens’ Cellphones, Even as NSA Program Debated in Congress

      The Associated Press reports today that the FBI has been operating a small air force all its own on the domestic front, registered under at least 13 fake companies – and hidden from the public.

    • Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance
    • Berners-Lee Urges Britons To Fight The Snooper’s Charter, But For One UK Tech Company It’s Too Late

      That comes from Aral Balkan, a well-known developer in the UK, who put the Snooper’s Charter as one of four key reasons why he and his team at ind.ie will be seeking another country that still values freedom and privacy. Sadly, it seems more likely that others will be decide to follow their example than that the UK government will heed Berners-Lee’s warning and change direction here.

    • CIA-backed Portland startup Tyfone raises $6.6M for decentralized security platform [Ed: "Cloud" is not security, it is surveillance]

      The 11-year-old company develops a combination of software and hardware security solutions that help clients in industries like finance, healthcare, and government manage data and digital assets in the cloud more securely.

    • Former CIA Officer: Freedom Act ‘Nothing to Do With Freedom’
    • CIA Chief: Cooperation with Israel Still Very Strong

      Speaking on CBS News, Brennan stressed that there is a “very, very strong relationship between United States and Israel on the intelligence, security and military fronts.”

    • Edward Snowden Hits Out at Russia’s Privacy Laws

      He also attacks Canada, France and Australia for expanding their surveillance powers

    • Spy Game In Afghanistan – Analysis

      Cooperation between the intelligence agencies of two countries is nothing new. Even during the Cold War, the CIA and KGB maintained communications. But the recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the spy agencies of Afghanistan and Pakistan – for long at loggerheads – is a first.

  • Civil Rights

06.05.15

Links 5/6/2015: Linux on ATMs, TISA Agreement Leak

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source? HP Enterprise will be all-in, post split, says CTO

    Speaking at the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas this week, CTO Martin Fink said open source will be central to how HP’s enterprise incarnation conducts its business.

    “We have taken this very, very seriously and we are all-in on the notion of open source,” Fink said, adding that even game-changing big bets like the Machine will be backed by open source software.

    [...]

    To prove it, on Wednesday HP announced Grommet, a new user interface framework that’s specifically tailored for enterprise applications and that HP has released under the Apache License.

  • How telecoms can escape vendor lock-in with open source NFV

    The problem: As mobile devices continue to proliferate, the Internet of Things keeps growing immensely, and more users and new data are pushed across telecom networks every day, network operators must invest in expanded facilities. The revenue from mobile applications is tied to number of devices/consumers not amount of data consumed. As time goes on, average revenue per user will remain flat or even decrease as data demand will increase significantly over time.

  • TISA Agreement Might Outlaw Governments From Mandating Open Source Software In Many Situations

    Now, this is nowhere near complete — it is “bracketed text” which is still being negotiated, and Colombia already opposes the text. Also, some may argue that the second bullet point, which says it only applies to “mass market” software and not “critical infrastructure” software solves some of these issues. Finally, some might argue that this is reasonable if looked at from the standpoint of a commercial provider of proprietary software, who doesn’t want to have to cough up its source code to a government just to win a grant.

    But, if that language stays, it seems likely that any government that ratifies the agreement could not then do something like mandate governments use open source office products. And that should be a choice those governments can make, if they feel that open source software is worth promoting and provides better security, reliability and/or cost effectiveness when compared to proprietary software. That seems tremendously problematic, unless you’re Microsoft.

  • Airbnb announces Aerosolve, an open-source machine learning software package

    The new tool, announced at Airbnb’s 2015 OpenAir developer conference in San Francisco, powers new pricing tips for hosts, which was also announced today. Written mostly in the Java and Scala programming languages, Aerosolve can also more intelligently rank and order things like images.

  • HP reveals Grommet open source app development framework

    Martin Fink, HP’s chief technology officer, revealed Grommet in a keynote speech at HP’s Discover conference in Las Vegas, explaining the framework will be available to everyone looking to create consistent user experiences in enterprise apps.

  • Stream processing, for dummies

    DataTorrent will be making it RTS core engine available under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

    The firm is a player in the real-time big data analytics market.

    It is also the creator of a unified ‘stream and batch processing’ platform.

  • Angry redditors rally to stop SourceForge’s mirror service

    SourceForge has been in the news a lot lately, and not for positive reasons. Angry redditors are rallying to encourage the mirror providers of SourceForge to stop supporting the site.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Apache OpenOffice versus LibreOffice

      Following yesterday’s LibreOffice report for 2014, comes another interesting report from Document Foundation members Barend Jonkers and Cor Nouws comparing the features of LibreOffice and OpenOffice. The 60-page report “focuses on areas as feasibility, smart use, quality and improvements, localization and more.” It makes clear that LibreOffice has undergone massive improvements as compared to OpenOffice.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Moves Ahead With Updating Their Radeon DRM Graphics Driver

      DragonFlyBSD and other BSD distributions porting the Linux DRM drivers are still several major releases behind the upstream kernel state, but at least they’re making progress for those wishing to use the open-source drivers as an alternative to the prominent BSD display driver: the NVIDIA BSD proprietary driver that’s of high quality and on par with the Windows and Linux NVIDIA drivers.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Octave 4.0.0 Released

      The Octave developers are pleased to announce a major new release of GNU Octave, version 4.0.0.

    • MediaGoblin 0.8.0: A Gallery of Fine Creatures

      We’re excited to announce that MediaGoblin 0.8.0, “A Gallery of Fine Creatures”, has been released! The biggest news is that the client to server API (making use of the future federation API) is much improved! That means that users no longer have to depend on a browser to access MediaGoblin.

    • Open Source History: What if GNU and Linux Had Cloned MS-DOS, Not Unix?

      First, let’s run through what actually happened. When Richard Stallman started the GNU project in 1984, he intended from the beginning to write a clone of the Unix operating system. He explicitly rejected the notion that GNU might instead aim to copy an operating system like MS-DOS. As he wrote in the February 1986 GNU newsletter, platforms like DOS, although “more widely used” than Unix, were “very weak systems, designed for tiny machines.”

    • MediaGoblin 0.8.0 Open Source Media Server Released with Initial Python 3 Support

      Deb Nicholson has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of a major new release of the open-source media server software MediaGoblin.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Ministry of Defence to build open source analytics platform

      The Ministry of Defence has launched a competition to build an ‘evolutionary’ new open source analytics platform to help it better understand its data.

    • France to boost uptake of free software in government

      France’s public administrations are encouraged to increase their use of free software, announces DISIC, the inter-ministerial Directorate for IT. Public administrations should become active participants in free software development communities, for example by allowing their software engineers to work on free software.

    • Defence body looks for messy data platform

      The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is dipping its toe into the waters of unstructured data with a competition for the development of prototypes for an open source analytics platform.

    • Embrace open source, says Ministry of Defence CIO

      The Ministry of Defence has launched a competition to build an ‘evolutionary’ new open source analytics platform to help it better understand its data, as CIO Mike Stone announced the MoD needs to drop its cautious approach and embrace open source.

  • Licensing

    • 5 Essential Duties of Legal Counsel in an Open Source Compliance Program

      Establishing an Open Source Review Board is one key way that companies can help ensure compliance with open source licenses, community norms and requirements (see the previous article, Why Companies That Use Open Source Need a Compliance Program, for more details.) In larger companies, a typical board is made of representatives from engineering, product teams and legal resources in addition to a Compliance Officer (sometimes called Director of Open Source).

      While FOSS compliance is more of an operational challenge related to execution and scaling than a legal challenge, legal counsel is an essential component of any review board and compliance program. Companies may choose to use internal legal counsel, or utilize external counsel on a fee basis. Regardless of how it’s achieved, there are five essential duties of an open source lawyer to ensure that a company observes all of the copyright notices and satisfies all the license obligations for the FOSS they use in their commercial products.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Beginning software delivery acceleration with DevOps

      Time and time again, we hear of companies achieving rapid acceleration with DevOps. Companies are touting success with the metric of deploys per day, sharing new baselines of 10, 50, or even 100 deploys a day. In more mature organizations, like LinkedIn, Netflix, Etsy, Facebook, and others, this number is a startling 1,000+ number. But, what does this even mean?

Leftovers

  • Security

    • MS Supports SSH, Keeping Up With the Kubuntus & More…

      Hmmm. Yeah, it’s smirk-inducing to see them finally want to join the rest of the world in the SSH department after all these years. But after reading Christine Hall’s article yesterday about our friends in Redmond and their “fox guarding the henhouse” security teams and their affinity for backdoors, you have to wonder, on a privacy level, if this is a good idea. I guess we’ll just have to see.

    • Thursday’s security alerts
    • Assume your GitHub account is hacked, users with weak crypto keys told

      The keys, which allow authorized users to log into public repository accounts belonging to the likes of Spotify, Yandex, and UK government developers, were generated using a buggy pseudo random number generator originally contained in the Debian distribution of Linux. During a 20-month span from 2006 to 2008, the pool of numbers available was so small that it made cracking the secret keys trivial. Almost seven years after Debian maintainers patched the bug and implored users to revoke old keys and regenerate new ones, London-based developer Ben Cartwright-Cox said he discovered the weakness still resided in a statistically significant number of keys used to gain secure shell (SSH) access to GitHub accounts.

    • Why Longer Passphrases are More Secure than Passwords [VIDEO]
    • This Hacked Kids’ Toy Opens Garage Doors in Seconds

      Nortek didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Another major brand of garage door opener, Genie, didn’t respond to to a request for comment either, but says on its website that its devices use rolling codes. A spokesperson for Chamberlain, the owner of the Liftmaster brand and one of the biggest sellers of garage door openers, initially told WIRED the company hasn’t sold fixed code doors since 1992. But when Kamkar dug up a 2007 manual for a Liftmaster device that seemed to use fixed codes, Chamberlain marketing executive Corey Sorice added that the company has supported and serviced older garage door openers until much more recently. “To the extent there are still operators in the market begin serviced by replacement parts, part of the objective is to get to safer and more secure products,” he said in a phone interview. “We’d love to see people check the safety and security of their [devices] and move forward.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Jeremy Corbyn

      The media dismiss any argument outwith the bounds of their narrow, manufactured corporate consensus as marginal and irrelevant. For example, never mind the fact that a clear majority in the UK has for years supported renationalisation of the railways. The very fact of its popular support makes it imperative to the BBC and other corporate media that it must not be voiced. Jeremy is very likely to voice it. Watch as he is carefully marginalised, patronised and excluded.

  • Privacy

    • A Misleading Moment of Celebration for a New Surveillance Program

      The morning after final passage of the USA Freedom Act, while some foes of mass surveillance were celebrating, Thomas Drake sounded decidedly glum. The new law, he told me, is “a new spy program.” It restarts some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act and further codifies systematic violations of Fourth Amendment rights.

      Later on Wednesday, here in Oslo as part of a “Stand Up For Truth” tour, Drake warned at a public forum that “national security” has become “the new state religion.” Meanwhile, his Twitter messages were calling the USA Freedom Act an “itty-bitty step” — and a “stop/restart kabuki shell game” that “starts w/ restarting bulk collection of phone records.”

      That downbeat appraisal of the USA Freedom Act should give pause to its celebrants. Drake is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency — and a whistleblower who endured prosecution and faced decades in prison for daring to speak truthfully about NSA activities. He ran afoul of vindictive authorities because he refused to go along with the NSA’s massive surveillance program after 9/11.

    • U.S. spy agency secretly expands warrantless Internet surveillance: report

      The U.S. government has secretly expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless Internet surveillance to search for evidence of what it called “malicious cyberactivity,” The New York Times reported Thursday, citing classified documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

      U.S. Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos in mid-2012 granting its secret approval for the NSA to begin hunting on Internet cables for data allegedly linked to computer intrusions originating abroad, including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the report said.

    • FBI anti-terror official calls on tech firms to ‘prevent encryption above all else’

      The FBI has again waded into the debate around encryption, with the bureau’s assistant director of counterterrorism telling the US congress that tech companies should “prevent encryption above all else”.

    • FBI official: Companies should help us ‘prevent encryption above all else’

      The debate over encryption erupted on Capitol Hill again Wednesday, with an FBI official testifying that law enforcement’s challenge is working with tech companies “to build technological solutions to prevent encryption above all else.”

      At first glance the comment from Michael B. Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, might appear to go further than FBI Director James B. Comey. Encryption, a technology widely used to secure digital information by scrambling data so only authorized users can decode it, is “a good thing,” Comey has said, even if he wants the government to have the ability get around it.

    • Breaking news: “Pyrawebs” rejected for good [Espanol/English]

      This afternoon, the Paraguayan Senate voted against a bill that would have mandated internet service providers (ISPs) to store internet communications metadata for one year, thus rejecting the “Pyrawebs” initiative for good. The House of Representatives in Paraguay previously voted against the bill in March before sending it to the Senate for a final decision.

    • A Machine for Keeping Secrets?

      Like any modern zero-day sold on the black market, the Enigma compromise had value only if it remained secret. The stakes were higher, but the basic template of the game—secret compromise, secret exploitation, doom on discovery—continues to be one basic form of the computer security game to this day. The allies went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their compromise of the Enigma, including traps like Operation Mincemeat (planting false papers on a corpse masquerading as a drowned British military officer). The Snowden revelations and other work has revealed the degree to which this game continues, with many millions of taxpayer dollars being spent keeping illicit access to software compromises available to the NSA, GCHQ and all the rest. The first rule is not to reveal success in breaking your enemy’s security by careless action; the compromise efforts that Snowden revealed had, after all, been running for many years before the public became aware of them.

    • Chris Soghoian Q+A: The Next Chapter of Surveillance Reform

      I recently conducted a wide-ranging Q+A with the ACLU’s chief technologist, Chris Soghoian, on a range of topics, from the “fraudulent” nature of the recent debate over Section 215 of the Patriot Act to the dire need for more technological expertise among those tasked with overseeing the Intelligence Community in the 21st Century. Another part of our conversation was particularly relevant to those who worry that the end of bulk telephony metadata collection is the high-water mark for intelligence reform. Our topic: The lack of attention to the fact that much of the US’s massive surveillance infrastructure is used for top secret purposes only loosely related to national security. While US intelligence agencies portray themselves as using their dark talents against ne’er-do-wells, the reality is far different, argues Soghoian. He took particular issue with the NSA and its foreign partners like Britain’s GCHQ, doing things like snooping on the employees of technology businesses in order to exploit their products for espionage purposes.

    • Leaked trade deal stops countries from saying where your data goes

      There’s been a fair share of leaked trade deals raising hackles in recent memory, but the latest could have some big repercussions for your data privacy. WikiLeaks has slipped out details of the in-progress Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), and one of its clauses would prevent the US, European Union and 23 other nations from controlling both where your data is stored as well as whether or not it’s accessible from outside of the country. Germany, for example, couldn’t demand that Facebook and Google store residents’ account information on local servers.

    • Facebook Messenger now lets you send friends a map with your location
    • First Victory for Citizens against Surveillance: French Military Planning Act before Constitutional Court!

      The French Council of State published today its decision to refer of the Question Prioritaire de Constitutionalité (Prioritary Question of Constitutionality1) brought by the FDN Federation, French Data Network and La Quadrature du Net against the article 20 of the 2014-2019 Military Planning Act voted in 2013. This decision is fundamental in the fight against generalised surveillance and the access to connection data by French intelligence services. It takes an important place in the current debates on the French Intelligence Bill.

  • Civil Rights

    • OPM hack: as China blames US for huge cyberattack, new era of cyberwarfare and internet terrorism arrives

      One of the most damaging and intense attacks on the US government ever took place this year. And nobody, even those that had been hit, knew.

      The US government said last night that it had lost control of data held by the Office of Personal Management, which holds information about all of the staff employed by the US government. Nobody knows why, or who, stole it — but that is the reality of modern warfare.

    • Scott Walker: Men Can Sue if a Woman Gets an Abortion, but Women Can’t Sue for Pay Discrimination

      In 2012, Walker repealed Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which put teeth in the state’s anti- wage discrimination laws by allowing women to seek damages in state court. The law was opposed by business lobbies like the Wisconsin Restaurant Association, and by the state senator who drove the law’s repeal, now-Congressman Glenn Grothman, who said the gender wage gap can be explained because “money is more important for men.”

    • Ludicrous Feminism Against Salmond

      That the Tories and Unionist establishment would attempt to land a sexist smear on Alex Salmond for calling a woman a, err, woman, is unsurprising. That they are joined by a number of ludicrous feminists is unsurprising too.

  • DRM

    • Egregious Nonsense Regarding eBook Standards

      That’s the same strategy Microsoft employed when it knocked WordPerfect and Lotus out of their preferred positions thirty years ago, making it possible to seamlessly import documents created under those programs, but making sure that exporting them back again met with less than perfect results. For the last ten years, Microsoft has fought an ongoing battle against the OpenDocument Format (ODF) to try and keep it that way, something I’ve written hundreds of blog posts about here.

      Also like Microsoft, which dramatically reduced updating Office after it wiped out the competition (as it also did with Internet Explorer, after it wiped out Netscape, until it was once again challenged by Firefox), Amazon continues to provide an extremely mediocre presentation of actual books on devices. Only recently has it announced something as basic as new fonts, many years after the initial release of the Kindle. It has, however innovated vigorously and successfully on its family of Kindle devices, in order to win over as many customers as possible to its proprietary platform.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • My Daughter is a Netflix VPN Thief, Media Boss Confesses

        The new boss of Canadian telecoms giant Bell Media has confessed that her own daughter is a “thief”. Speaking at the Canadian Telecom Summit, Mary Ann Turcke says her 15-year-old was using a VPN to access Netflix’s superior U.S. service but she quickly put a stop to it. Netflix could’ve done so earlier, she added, but chose not to.

      • Pirate Bay Block Doesn’t Boost Sales, Research Shows

        New research from Carnegie Mellon University shows that the UK Pirate Bay blockade had no affect on legal consumption. Instead, visitors switched to alternative sites, Pirate Bay mirrors, or started using VPNs. However, the same research also reveals that blocking several major pirate sites at once does boost the use of paid legal services such as Netflix.

06.04.15

Links 4/6/2015: Sourceforge Hijacks Nmap Account, IBM Acquires BlueBox

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Black “mirror”: SourceForge has now taken over Nmap audit tool project [Updated]

    SoureForge has sworn off its ways of wrapping “unmaintained” code from open source projects in installers that offer bundled commercial products in the wake of objections raised by some open source communities. But one policy remains in effect—the takeover of project pages SourceForge’s staff decides are inactive, and assignment of ownership of those projects to staff accounts. One of the latest projects grabbed in this way is the Nmap security auditing tool.

  • Sourceforge Hijacks the Nmap Sourceforge Account

    Hi Folks! You may have already read the recent news about Sourceforge.net
    hijacking the GIMP project account to distribute adware/malware.
    Previously GIMP used this Sourceforge account to distribute their Windows
    installer, but they quit after Sourceforge started tricking users with fake
    download buttons which lead to malware rather than GIMP. Then Sourceforge
    took over GIMP’s account and began distributing a trojan installer which
    tries to trick users into installing various malware and adware before
    actually installing GIMP.

  • SourceForge under fire again for seizing Nmap account
  • Advantages entice enterprises to embrace open source

    The state of affairs of enterprise IT is changing quickly. Open source will become a much higher percentage of every IT organization’s environment, given its advantages in terms of cost, control, and innovation. Likewise, open source skills will soon become a critical requirement, both for using open source wisely, but also in attracting the kind of talent necessary to compete in a Third Platform world.

  • Survey: Despite Open Source Community Gripes About Apple, Most Still Use It [132 self-selected respondents who use a particular bit of software, not "Open Source Community"]
  • Mac Asay: Open source vs. Apple: The holy war that wasn’t

    Actually, the very term “open source” suggests a more relaxed view on software sharing, having displaced its GPL-wielding free software cousins years back. Whereas a free sourceror wouldn’t be caught dead using anything other than (GNU) Linux, open sourcerors are happy to use whatever works.

  • Events

    • Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South

      That said, the next stop on the Magical Linux-y Tour will be in North Carolina — you’ll see the link in the upper right of this page — the SouthEast LinuxFest, known more commonly by its acronym SELF (FOSS Force is a Supporting Sponsor), takes place next weekend in Charlotte. For three days, June 12-14 to be precise, Jeremy Sands and the rest of the crew at SELF bring Linux, BSD and FOSS to what has lately become my favorite geographical location, by name: the GNU/South.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Rust commits to 6-week release cycle

        The Rust programming language is an ambitious project in many ways. With the release of Rust 1.0 on May 15, one might ask, “What’s next?” Many words have been written about the technical aspects of how the Rust language achieves its goals of memory safety without garbage collection, but less has been discussed about the project itself and how it is structured. Open source projects are more than just code, and Rust is no exception.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Cisco acquires Piston Cloud Computing, will use to ramp up Intercloud offerings

      Piston gives Cisco more muscle around distributed systems and automated deployment, in addition to adding another level of infrastructure to the Cisco OpenStack private cloud.

    • Does Hadoop Need Governance? Datameer Says Yes

      Datameer, which is billed as a big data insights platform for rapid data discovery, has announced new data governance capabilities for its native Hadoop environment. We’ve been reporting on indications that many enterprises are finding Hadoop, well, very hard to deploy and manage. Datameer acknowledges that Hadoop is complex to deploy and use effectively, and notes that “analysts and administrators alike need an easier way to navigate data pipelines that have been developed by multiple departments and participants, and involve multiple data sources.”

    • IBM Acquires Managed OpenStack Vendor BlueBox

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The LibreOffice Report: 40 Pages of Yippee!

      The Document Foundation today released their annual report outlining their work for the year 2014. It was another banner year for the free office suite from donations to bugs fixed to community outreach. Every year TDF and LibreOffice continue to break previous records. TDF thanked everyone who contributed to their success including those with financial support.

    • LibreOffice/Document Foundation Bonanza

      Next to Linux or Android, LibreOffice is one of the most active FLOSS projects in the world. Arguably, it is one of the keys to liberating the desktop from Wintel as the office suite is one of Wintel’s key lock-ins for business. With moves to create a web-based version and one for Android/Linux, the future is bright however IT diversifies. Anyone considering the cost of IT should look at the office suite. Almost everyone uses one.

  • CMS

    • What’s New for You This June in Open Source CMS

      You can’t talk about open source content management systems without talking about WordPress, the most popular CMS on the planet.

      WordPress powers some of the largest websites in the world including CNN, Time magazine and Ted. According to W3tech, WordPress powers 23 percent of the top 10 million websites in the world.

  • Business

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Nordic countries to cooperate on open government

      Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have decided to cooperate on their open government strategies and implementations. To begin with, they will share their national OGP work and jointly promote open data.

    • Rewind on Aryeom and Jehan’s Open videos

      The concept was an interactive video included in an HTML canvas. People could upload a photograph and an address (using OpenStreetMap assets), to show their support to Mozilla, and their image would show embedded during video viewing on the right coordinates in the drawn world map. The actual page which won is still up, with the interactive video version.

      [...]

      This all coupled with more GIMP, Blender, Ardour, Synfig, etc. improvements, we should soon be able to have a very powerful ecosystem on GNU/Linux for any kind of movie making and animation.

    • Open Data

      • New data science major aligns with growing corporate needs

        The University established a new data science major, which will be subsumed under LSA’s Statistics Department and the College of Engineering’s Division of Computer Science and Engineering. The new major will be available in Fall 2015 to both LSA and Engineering students.

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • Why my doctor prescribed me open hardware

        I recall a senior medical doctor once saying that being a practitioner nowadays is much more difficult than ever before, because when people get diagnosed, they go home to search the web, and often come back with tough questions. Open hardware for physiological computing isn’t making it any easier, but it seems like that’s not a bad thing.

Leftovers

  • Toyota weighs Ford’s open-source CarPlay rival

    It’s not the first time the two companies have collaborated on infotainment. Back in 2011, Ford and Toyota inked a deal that saw them work together on next-gen standards for dashboard tech, including making it not only smarter but safer to use on the move.

  • Ford details SYNC 3’s ambitious roll-out

    Announced back in December, SYNC 3 sees Ford step away from the Microsoft system of older SYNC versions and instead use a QNX-based platform.

  • Hardware

  • Security

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Finance

    • Poor People Can’t Afford Homes–so NYT Calls for Making Them More Expensive

      There are two problems with this complaint. First, it is factually wrong, or at least misleading. The weak price performance of lower-cost homes depends very much on the time window being considered. If homeowners bought near the peak of the bubble, which disproportionately affected lower-income neighborhoods, then their prices would still be depressed; however, if they bought before the bubble, they would be doing quite well.

    • PayPal draws consumer ire over robo-texting rights

      When eBay cuts PayPal loose this summer, users of the new digital money giant will find they’ve agreed to new terms of service that take effect July 1. Those terms include PayPal giving itself the right to robocall or robo-text members at any phone number the firm can find, for just about any reason — from debt collecting to advertisements to opinion polling.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Scott Walker: The First ALEC President?

      Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker will address the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in San Diego this July.

    • Friedman Turns Baltimore Uprising Into Commercial for Wife’s Charter School

      Today putative liberal and mustachioed wonker Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 6/3/15) did what he does best: take something vaguely topical and use it as a hook to promote whatever topic he and his billionaire friends want to propagandize that week.

      Whether it’s advocating collective punishment of Ukrainians to push his CEO friend’s “Green Energy” IPO during its quiet period, or unironically floating the idea of arming ISIS to demagogue Iran, it’s a tried and true formula for America’s most tedious Important Person.

  • Censorship

    • Google Takes MPAA to Court Over Secret Censorship Plans

      Hoping to find out more about the secret Internet censorship plans Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood was pushing, Google is now taking the MPAA to court. After several subpoenas remained largely unanswered, the search giant is now asking a New York federal court to ensure that the MPAA other parties hand over the requested information.

  • Privacy

    • Freedom Act: US law limits snooping, just as UK gears up to make its spies far more powerful

      The US has dramatically limited the powers of its spy agencies, just as the UK gears up to hugely increase what its own can do.

      The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act last night, placing new restrictions and oversight on the way that the country’s National Security Agency can spy on citizens, in what was hailed as a victory for privacy campaigners and a direct result of the Snowden leaks.

      But in the UK, lawmakers are getting ready to pass into law the “Snoopers’ Charter” — which among other things imposes that internet service providers must store information on their users so that intelligence agencies can access them. After the majority Conservative government was elected, the Draft Communications Bill could include even more powers, with David Cameron having threatened to ban or reduce the encryption that is used to keep data secure.

    • USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go From Here

      The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.

    • Don’t Celebrate USA Freedom Act Passage

      Mozilla recently announced it’s support for the USA Freedom Act alongside allies like the EFF, but the EFF also ended up withdrawing its support because of deficiencies in the legislation and a recent opinion from an appeals court.

      I think Mozilla should have withdrawn its support on this still flawed bill because while it did push forward some important reforms it still extended flawed sections of the law that infringe on individual’s civil liberties such as Section 206 “Roving Wiretap” authority program. This program essentially allows the FBI access to any phone line, mobile communications or even internet connections a suspect may be using without ever having to provide a name to anyone. This is clearly not good legislation because it allows overreach and lacks a requirement that communications or accounts being tapped are tied to the subject. While this is just one example there are many other provisions that allow intelligence and law enforcement agencies to continue their spying, just not as broadly as before.

  • Civil Rights

    • Coulson Lying is OK by Judge – to Maintain Sheridan Conviction

      Coulson lied about phone hacking in the Sheridan trial. Coulson has form. “Lord” David Burn also has form. He was part of the Megrahi “defence” team of advocates who failed to ask a score of glaringly obvious questions about the holes in the prosecution case and payment of witnesses in the fit-up of the century. The Scottish legal establishment is a sewer.

    • Obama confident in the TSA despite failure to detect explosives

      President Obama has confidence in the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) despite the ease with which undercover agents were able to smuggle explosives into airports, the White House said Tuesday.

      “The president does continue to have confidence that the officers of the TSA do very important work that continues to protect the American people,” press secretary Josh Earnest said.

    • Obama’s trust-me approach falls flat with Democrats

      President Obama’s argument that Democrats should trust his vision on trade is falling flat on Capitol Hill.

      Democrats — even some of Obama’s closest allies — say it’s not enough for the president to pronounce his trade agenda the most progressive in history.

      The lawmakers want assurances that the agreements under negotiation, particularly a huge deal being finalized with Pacific Rim nations, will protect U.S. jobs — assurances many say they simply haven’t gotten.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality: EU Member States Refuse to Hear the Voice of Citizens

      The Council of the European Union has been blocking for weeks the principle of Net Neutrality and its entrenching in the legislation. As the European Parliament refuses for now to give in to pressure from Member States and the powerful telecom lobbies, the negotiations held last night, which brought together delegations from the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission, were therefore unsuccessful. The EU Parliament must keep on refusing any agreement that would undermine a thorough protection of the Net neutrality principle.

  • DRM

    • The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever

      Jason Scott knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the preservation of digital software. At the Internet Archive, he’s collected thousands of classic games, pieces of software, and bits of digital ephemera. His sole goal is making those things widely available through the magic of browser-based emulation.

      Compared to other types of archaeology, this kind of preservation is still relatively easy for now. While the magnetic and optical disks and ROM cartridges that hold classic games and software will eventually be rendered unusable by time, it’s currently pretty simple to copy their digital bits to a form that can be preserved and emulated well into the future.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom Thwarts Huge U.S. Government Asset Grab

        Kim Dotcom has booked a significant victory in his battle against U.S. efforts to seize assets worth millions of dollars. In a decision handed down this morning, Justice Ellis granted Dotcom interim relief from having a $67m forfeiture ordered recognized in New Zealand. Dotcom informs TF that the victory gives his legal team new momentum.

      • Russia Orders ISPs to Block The Pirate Bay

        Following a European trend, the Russian telecommunications watchdog Roskomnadzor has ordered local ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. Without a separate court order, two domain names of the popular torrent site have been added to the national blocklist.

06.03.15

Links 3/6/2015: More Ubuntu Phones, Qt Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • SourceForge commits reputational suicide

    Despite seeming reformed last year, SourceForge has been caught red-handed abusing the reputations of open source projects

  • Test It Right: 3 Open Source Load Testing Tools for Your Application!
  • Did Slashdot bury negative stories about SourceForge?
  • Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned SourceForge

    If you’ve followed any tech news aggregator in the past week, you’ve probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a long history of adware laden installers, but they used to be opt-in. It appears that the process is now mandatory for many projects.

    People have been wary of SourceForge ever since they added a feature to allow projects to opt-in to adware bundling, but you could at least claim that projects are doing it by choice. But now that SourceForge is clearly being malicious, they’ve wiped out all of the user trust that was built up over sixteen years of operating. No clueful person is going to ever download something from SourceForge again. If search engines start penalizing SourceForge for distributing adware, they won’t even get traffic from people who haven’t seen this story, wiping out basically all of their value.

  • Sourceforge Hijacking Projects to Deliver Malware

    It’s been a crazy few days in Linuxville to be sure. Sourceforge is accused of locking out GIMP developers and inserting malware into the application for users to download. Scott Dowdle spotted a “GNOME versus KDE” in MR. ROBOT and Ubuntu was seen in a Google promotional video. David Both shows users how to use Konqueror and Attila Orosz takes a look at Deepin 2014.3. And finally, is the Bling factor in Linux doomed?

  • Buffalo First to Ship Wireless Routers with DD-WRT NXT Open Source Firmware
  • Buffalo Wireless Routers Have DD-WRT NXT Open Source Firmware

    Buffalo First to Ship Wireless Routers with DD-WRT NXT Open Source Firmware

  • Why Intel Invests in Open Source [VIDEO]

    Few if any companies in the world today are as deeply involved in open source work as tech giant Intel. Helping to lead Intel’s open source efforts is Imad Sousou, VP in Intel’s Software and Services Group and GM of the Intel Open Source Technology Center

  • Debunking the Myths of the Open Source Community

    The Linux operating system is the most popular open-source software in the world and has been ported to more computer hardware platforms than any other operating system. Readers will know the story of the underdog who rose to become the world’s leading server operating system. Android especially, a Linux derivative, has caused a stir in recent years with two out of three tablets and 75 percent of all smartphones using the Linux derivative operating system.

  • ‘Cardinal’ Takes Flight: ONOS Ships New Open Source SDN OS Version

    ONOS’ community today announced the availability of the third release of its open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS), named Cardinal. Providing the best value proposition for scale, performance and high availability, Cardinal adds comprehensive feature sets and performance improvements to enable a new variety of deployments and solution proof of concepts (POCs). Cardinal delivers several significant enhancements, mainly in the areas of Application Intent Framework, southbound interfaces and new distributed core features and capabilities.

  • Open source and Apple: The nagging nausea

    Open source software fans hate walled gardens. After all, they believe in communities supporting each other for the greater good. Sure, they fight over the details and who gets the most support, but that’s part of what it means to be a creator, an owner, a participant in both the journey and the final result.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • Why Companies That Use Open Source Need a Compliance Program

      Corporate use of open source software is now the norm with more than 60 percent of companies saying that they build their products with open source software, according to the 2015 Future of Open Source survey. But that same survey also revealed that most companies that use FOSS in their products don’t have formal procedures in place for ensuring that their software complies with open source licenses and regulations.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • New open digital humanities projects

      The Digital Public Library of America and Europeana are collaborating on a project to standardize usage rights statements. Despite operating under different copyright laws (United States and European Union), the DPLA and Europeana are keen to have a clear and compatible way to share copyright information with collaborators and users. To that end, work has begun on developing a technical framework for interoperable rights statements. Currently, they are seeking comments on their Rights Statement White Paper and their Technical Infrastructure White Paper. The deadline for comments on both papers is June 26, 2015.

  • Programming

    • PyPy 2.6 Released, ~7x Faster Than CPython

      Version 2.6 of the PyPy JIT-compiler-based interpreter for Python has been released. With PyPy 2.6 there’s some Python compatibility improvements along with Numpy improvements and preliminary support for a new lightweight stats profiler.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Charlie Kennedy

      Charlie told me the story of how, as party leader, he was invited by Blair to Downing Street to be shown the original key evidence on Iraqi WMD. Charlie was really worried as he walked there, that there really would be compelling evidence as Blair said, and he would then be unable to maintain the party line against the war. When he saw the actual intelligence on which the dodgy dossier was based, he was astounded. It was incredibly weak and “totally unconvincing”. Blair was not present while Charlie saw the reports, but he saw him afterwards and told Blair he was quite astonished by the paucity of the evidence. Blair went white and looked really rattled, and resorted to a plea for patriotic solidarity. He then reminded Charlie he was not allowed to reveal what he had seen. Charlie felt bound by good faith – he had been shown the intelligence in confidence – not to publish this. Not I think his best moral judgement.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • PM Gifts MPs 10% Pay Rise

      DAVID CAMERON effectively handed penny-pinching MPs a backdated 10 per cent pay rise yesterday after the PM dropped his opposition to the extra cash.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Government should be able to block websites, says report

      Government agencies should have the right to block access to any websites they wish, says Parliamentary Committee, provided there is an adequate oversight mechanism in place.

      House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications has handed down its report into whether Government agencies should ‘disrupt the operation of illegal online services.’

    • The Streisand Effect With Chinese Characteristics

      Even in China, people find ways to circumvent the country’s famous Great Firewall that tries to block access to some external sites with material deemed politically dangerous. Interestingly, an editorial in the Chinese-government tabloid, the Global Times, written in response to the students’ publication, recognizes that fact…

  • Privacy

    • Senate delays vote on NSA phone records dragnet

      A controversial program allowing the U.S. National Security Agency to collect millions of domestic telephone records expired Sunday night after the Senate failed to vote on a bill to extend the authority for the surveillance.

  • Civil Rights

    • TSA Not Detecting Weapons at Security Checkpoints

      This is bad. I have often made the point that airport security doesn’t have to be 100% effective in detecting guns and bombs.

    • EXCLUSIVE: Undercover DHS Tests Find Security Failures at US Airports

      An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.

    • Medical Marijuana Patient Protests After House Raided, Vibrator Allegedly Confiscated

      With her four teenagers inside, Ginnifer Hency’s house was raided by officers who suspected she was using and selling marijuana.

      In fact, she was. Hency, a multiple sclerosis patient with a medical marijuana card, was charged with intent to deliver, “even though I’m allowed to possess and deliver,” Hency said, in testimony before the Michigan House Committee.

      Medical marijuana use had been suggested by her neurologist, Hency said, adding that she can’t take run-of-the-mill pain medication because of a heart condition.

    • Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide

      In an alley in Denver, police gunned down a 17-year-old girl joyriding in a stolen car. In the backwoods of North Carolina, police opened fire on a gun-wielding moonshiner. And in a high-rise apartment in Birmingham, Ala., police shot an elderly man after his son asked them to make sure he was okay. Douglas Harris, 77, answered the door with a gun.

    • EU arts policies could lead to ISDS lawsuits, admits German government

      The German federal government has admitted that an EU country’s arts policies could lead to it being sued by foreign corporations before investor tribunals under trade agreements being negotiated with Canada and the US. Both the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently include the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows foreign investors to claim millions of pounds from governments for “indirect expropriation” such as an alleged loss of future profits.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Hollywood: Piracy Poses A Great Cybersecurity Threat

        The MPAA is advising the U.S. Government’s Internet Policy Task Force to help combat piracy, which they say poses a great cybersecurity threat. According to Hollywood, cyber criminals use pirated content as bait, to exploit citizens through malware and other scams.
        TSA Not Detecting Weapons at Security Checkpoints

06.02.15

Links 2/6/2015: Black Lab Linux Releases, Krita Fundraiser

Posted in News Roundup at 8:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, Part 3: Creating a Product

    What is the value of an open source platform? Would someone ever pay for it outright? Indeed, how does someone use an open source platform? Let’s start with the oldest and most significant of open source platforms, Linux. For the longest time, Linux was dismissed as a non-viable data center technology for “enterprise-grade” or “business critical” operations because it had no support model, no applications that ran on it and no obvious way to make money from it. How, then, did Linux become the engine that fueled the growth of the world’s open source ecosystem, an ecosystem that could be valued in the trillions of dollars, when calculating the percentage of the world’s economy that relies on open source systems? Was it just a bunch of hippies sharing the software and singing about it, or were there clear business reasons paving the way to its eventual victory?

  • Why enterprises embrace open source

    The state of affairs of enterprise IT is changing quickly. Open source will become a much higher percentage of every IT organization’s environment, given its advantages in terms of cost, control, and innovation. Likewise, open source skills will soon become a critical requirement, both for using open source wisely, but also in attracting the kind of talent necessary to compete in a Third Platform world.

  • SourceForge locked in projects of fleeing users, cashed in on malvertising [Updated]

    The takeover of the SourceForge account for the Windows version of the open-source GIMP image editing tool reported by Ars last week is hardly the first case of the once-pioneering software repository attempting to cash in on open-source projects that have gone inactive or have actually attempted to shut down their SourceForge accounts. Over the past few years, SourceForge (launched by VA Linux Systems in 1999 and now owned by the tech job site company previously known as Dice) has made it a business practice to turn abandoned or inactive projects into platforms for distribution of “bundle-ware” installers.

    Despite promises to avoid deceptive advertisements that trick site visitors into downloading unwanted software and malware onto their computers, these malicious ads are legion on projects that have been taken over by SourceForge’s anonymous editorial staff. SourceForge’s search engine ranking for these projects often makes the site the first link provided to people seeking downloads for code on Google and Bing search results.

    And because of SourceForge’s policies, it’s nearly impossible for open-source projects to get their code removed from the site. SourceForge is, in essence, the Hotel California of code repositories: you can check your project out any time you want, but you can never leave.

  • Make your very own emojis with Open-Source emojidex
  • Emojis go open-source with emojidex
  • Measuring the performance of a community manager

    In an open organization, measuring performance for particular roles like community managers may not be straightforward, especially when comparing those roles to others with more defined success metrics, goals, and outcomes. In my experience over the past six years, I’ve worked closely with my manager to make sure that we are in sync with my objectives and what I need to do in order to maximize my impact in my role as a community manager.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Security, creating a federated cloud, and more OpenStack news

      Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

    • DNSSEC, DANE and the failure of X.509

      As a few people have noticed, I’m a bit of an internet control freak: In an age of central “cloud based” services, I run pretty much my own everything (blog, mail server, DNS, OpenID, web page etc.). That doesn’t make me anti-cloud; I just believe in federation instead of centralisation. In particular, I believe in owning my own content and obeying my own rules rather than those of $BIGCLOUDPROVIDER.

  • Databases

  • Funding/GSoC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Mr Paulwell, we cannot afford to be left behind

      As a technology user and enthusiast, I believe in the critical role of open-source software to create the applications and infrastructure necessary to support government-funded technology projects. There is an accelerating interest in and use of open-source software worldwide. Local governments are changing. Forward-thinking municipalities are embracing technology to make countries and cities better for everyone. Innovative government staff are sharing resources, best practices, and collaborating on common problems. Jamaica needs to provide a broad range of resources, programmes and services to support and advance civic innovation.

      As open-source software becomes the leading information technology day by day, and there are open-source alternatives to most of the commercial software, Jamaica must join this technological revolution, as the national pledge does state, “…so that Jamaica may play her part in the advancement of the whole human race”.

      Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a licence in which the copyright holder supplies the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any reason or function. Open-source software is oftentimes developed in a public, collaborative manner. It is the most striking example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open-content movements.

  • Licensing

    • Conservancy Seeks Your Questions on GPL Enforcement

      Historically, Conservancy has published extensive materials about enforcement of the GPL, including blog posts, announcements regarding compliance actions, many sections appearing in the definitive Copyleft Guide (a joint initiative with the Free Software Foundation). After Conservancy’s recent announcement of its funding of Christoph Hellwig’s lawsuit against VMware, Conservancy has sought to answer as many questions as possible about GPL enforcement.

    • The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews François Marier, creator of Libravatar

      In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with François Marier, a free software developer from New Zealand. He is the creator and lead developer of Libravatar. In addition to his passion for decentralization, he contributes to the Debian project and volunteers on the FSF licensing team.

      Libravatar is a free network service providing profile photos for a number of Web sites, including bugs.debian.org and git.kernel.org. Its flexible architecture allows end users to host their own images and allows Web sites to use Gravatar as a fallback when necessary. It is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, or end user can opt for any later version (GNU AGPLv3+).

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 5 reasons wikis rock for documentation

      You may not have noticed, but people often become attached to their favorite technology. This could be a mobile phone, a programming language, or a text editor. When you work on someone else’s project, you generally have to go with whatever the prevailing tools and languages are, but when it’s your own project, you get to choose the toys. Documentation requires technology, too, but most people have less of a pre-set opinion about documentation tooling than they do about web frameworks and version control systems. So how is a project to choose?

    • Open Data

      • UW students use open source mapping to aid relief efforts in Nepal

        Half a world away, University of Washington civil and envi­ron­men­tal engi­neer­ing stu­dents trace the out­lines of roads, paths and build­ings in Nepal from their lap­tops.

        Using open data soft­ware Open­StreetMap, the students in assistant professor Jes­sica Kamin­sky’s Civil Engi­neer­ing in Devel­op­ing Com­mu­ni­ties class joined an online com­mu­nity effort to turn satel­lite imagery of Nepal into maps and aid the earth­quake relief effort. These dig­i­tized maps provide emer­gency respon­ders and relief coordinators responding to the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks in Nepal with crit­i­cal data to guide teams deployed on the ground.

      • Bulgarian government publishes first open datasets

        Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Currently, about 36 datasets from 26 public agencies have been made available online. The organisations involved were summoned to do so by the Council of Ministers. The Council even has a dedicated team to overcome resistance at the agencies and help them to extract and cleanse the data from the databases. The ambition is to publish another 100 datasets before the end of this year.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • UK overhauls its Digital Service Standard

      The United Kingdom has revised its Digital Service Standard, which describes the components for building eGovernment services. The update came into effect on 1 June, and is to be used for new and redesigned external-facing services.

Leftovers

06.01.15

Links 1/6/2015: wattOS R9, Tanglu 3

Posted in News Roundup at 5:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • LightSail solar spacecraft gets back in touch with its ground crew

    The Planetary Society reports that the Carl Sagan-inspired spacecraft rebooted as predicted, and the ground team is once again in touch. There’s already a software fix waiting in the wings, and there will be a decision on when to deploy it “very soon” — if all goes according to plan, the Society will deploy the vehicle’s namesake sails soon afterward.

  • Why Doesn’t Everyone Love Linux and Open Source?

    If Linux is so great, why has it not replaced Windows, OS X and other closed-source operating systems completely? More generally, why do people still write and develop proprietary software, if open source is a more efficient, user-oriented and secure way to code? Those are important questions about the big-picture significance and future of free and open source software, and they’re worth thinking more about.

    I do not mean those questions to sound pejorative, or dismissive of the idea that Linux and other open source software is actually good. Open source has distinct benefits for both users programmers and users, which make it superior in many ways to closed-source software.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • OpenDaylight is One of the Best Controllers for OpenStack — Here’s How to Implement It

      The integration of OpenStack and OpenDaylight (ODL) is a hot topic, with abundant, detailed information available; however, the majority of these articles focus on explaining usage aspects, rather than how the integration is implemented.

    • Docker Delivers Security Configuration Checking Tool

      The Docker Bench for Security script is packaged as a Docker container to make it easier to run and test. One of the CIS Benchmark’s recommendations is to limit container privileges to only what is needed to run. Somewhat ironically, the Docker Bench for Security script is a very high-privilege container that has broad access to host resources—usually something a container should not be able to do. That said, as a security testing tool, the container does need the broad access to validate host configuration for container deployment properly.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.2 To Support The EFI System Resource Table

      The Linux 4.2 kernel cycle that will soon officially commence will be adding support for the EFI System Resource Table (ESRT) in order to allow the updating of UEFI/BIOS on modern systems from the Linux desktop.

    • Linux 4.0, Linux 4.1 Brings Performance Boosts For Some Intel Low-Power Hardware
    • Linux 4.1-rc6

      It’s been a fairly normal week, although I can’t say that the rc’s
      have exactly started shrinking yet. No, the rc’s haven’t been all that
      big to begin with this release cycle, and things have been fairly
      calm, but I’d be happier if we didn’t have noise in raid5 and
      device-mapper at this stage.

      That said, it’s not like rc6 is a big rc, and things look normal. This
      is about half drivers (mainly scsi target, networking, and graphics,
      plus the aforementioned raid and dm changes, with other random fixes).
      The rest is fairly evenly split between architecture updates (alpha
      stands out), filesystem updates (xfs, cifs and overlayfs) and “misc”
      (networking, turbostat tool update, documentation).

      Most of the fixes are really quite small. Shortlog appended, skimming
      it gives a flavor of the kinds of things we have here.

      Linus

    • Linux 4.1-rc6 Kernel Released
    • Linus Torvalds Announces Linux Kernel 4.1 Release Candidate 6

      It’s Sunday, so guess what?! Linus Torvalds has just announced yet another Release Candidate (RC) version for the forthcoming Linux kernel 4.1, available for download and testing right now.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Broadwell HD Graphics Tests With Mesa 10.7 Git

        While Mesa 10.7 just recently entered development, the Git code is often benchmarked on Phoronix, and with not having delivered any Intel Broadwell Linux graphics tests in some time, here’s the latest numbers as of this weekend.

      • Libav Adds H.264 & HEVC Encoders For NVIDIA’s NVENC

        Following FFmpeg in supporting NVENC for NVIDIA’s GPU-based video encoding on Linux systems, the forked Libav project has now written up their own NVENC support for H.264 and H.265/HEVC.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva : An obituary

        Mandriva is certainly a rather unique company; it has also been the company for which I was privileged enough to work two times, one in 2003 as an intern for several months. Back then I used to handle the national resellers’network. The second time was ten years afterwards in 2012 and 2013, this time as a consultant helping them with their Open Source strategy and their marketing activities. One can see how this company is rather special for me. During my last “tenure” there I got to know what we now know to be the “last” team of Mandriva, its last incarnation as a company. Last week, we learned that the company has been liquidated, which essentially means not just that the company filed for bankruptcy, but that the company as such exists no more. Mandriva went several times (three times?) into bankruptcy, but was never obviously liquidated. At this stage I have no idea what became of the assets, nor its subsidiaries.mandriva-logo-opt

    • Arch Family

      • Latest Manjaro Linux Update Patches the Nasty EXT4 RAID Data Corruption Bug

        On May 30, the Manjaro Development Team, through Philip Müller, informed all Manjaro Linux users about the immediate availability for download of the tenth update for the stable Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 distribution.

      • Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 RC2 Comes with KDE Plasma 5.3.1 and KDE Apps 15.04.1
      • Manjaro OpenRC 0.8.13 – reinventing init without systemd

        It would be an understatement to say that systemd’s introduction as the dominant init system for modern Linux distros has stirred controversy. Both opponents and supporters of this new way of doing things have tended to get rather excited – to put it mildly – whenever the topic of systemd comes up on various tech blogs and forums. Defending one’s choice of init systems from critics has become a sort of moral obligation, if not a way of life. Take the “wrong” side of the argument on your favourite tech forum, and you can expect a deluge of heated comments, frequently containing accusations of “troll” and even nastier descriptive words not suitable for publication.

        I suppose it’s natural for geeks to get emotional about their operating system. In fact, if you’ve seen the 2013 movie Her, it’s predicted that in the near future not only will we be able to love our own personal operating system, but also have sex with it. Indeed, I think we’re already there, to judge by the way people have become attached to their mobile handsets.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 8.1 to Arrive on June 6

        Debian 8 (Jessie) was announced only a month ago, and now its developers are preparing the first point update for it and they even have a precise date in mind.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Goodbye, SourceForge.

    ourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site, started to place misleading ads (like fake download buttons) a few years ago. They are also bundling third-party adware/malware directly with their Windows installer.

  • Google’s I/O 2015 Web App Released As Open Source

    Now that the weekend is here, the after effects of this year’s android extravaganza that is Google I/O is still being fully digested. The announcements that came through will have repercussions going forward for the rest of this year, not to mention well into next year and beyond as well. Although, this year did not as many mega announcements as there was last year, there was still quite a few notable ones on offer. A few of the big headline points included the unveiling and releasing of the developer preview of Android M, as well as the announcing and brief explanation of Google’s next mobile payment platform, Android Pay. Of course, one of the surprise hits of this year’s event was the announcement (and subsequent release) of Google’s new photo service, which is now known as Google Photos.

  • SourceForge Accused of Bundling GIMP with Adware

    If you’ve downloaded a copy of GIMP for Windows from SourceForge in recent days, you may want to double check to make sure you didn’t get other programs installed as well. Some copies of the “open source Photoshop” were apparently being offered with for-profit adware bundled with the installer.

  • Project Releases

    • GNU Octave 4.0 Released, Includes A GUI & OpenGL

      GNU Octave, a high-level programming language for numerical computations and an open-source alternative to MATLAB, is out this weekend with a huge release. Meet GNU Octave 4.0.

      The GNU Octave 4.0 release now uses a GUI by default when running interactively, defaults to using OpenGL graphics with Qt while having fallback support for Gnuplot and Fltk, adds new audio functions/classes, makes other language additions, and has a whole lot of other changes.

    • Brasero Review – Burning CDs Like It’s the ’90s

      Brasero is an application from the GNOME stack that is used to burn CDs and DVDs or to creates copies from other disks. It’s been around for many years, and it’s trusted implicitly, but it doesn’t hurt if we analyze it a little bit more thoroughly.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Now, open-source platform emojidex offers emojis as service

      Washington: Now, a new project, named emojidex, is offering emojis as a service that allows developers to share new emojis with each other and add them to their apps and websites.

    • Indian Wikipedia page grows to 800K page views a month

      The Odia language is spoken by more than 40 million people in the Indian state of Odisha (the 9th largest Indian state by area) and its neighboring states, as well as, the Odia diaspora living outside India. With over 5000 years of literary heritage, the Odia language has been recognized as one of the oldest South Asian languages and has been given the status of a “classical language” by the Indian government.

    • Open Data

      • NU grad aids Nepal relief effort through open-source mapping

        When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal, the world wanted to help the people, but few were as well-placed as 1998 NU graduate Neil Horning, who lives in Kathmandu.

        Already well-known to the open source mapping community for a human rights mapping website called NepalMonitor.org, Horning had only to grab his laptop and make his way through the rubble to be tapped for a new assignment.

        He would be the new coordinator of Quakemap.org, born the day after the quake in a high-tech workshop called Kathmandu Living Labs.

      • Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) Develops a Code Of Conduct

        Over the last decade there has been a gradual adoption of Code-Of-Conduct statements at events and within organisations, including at FOSS4G events and within OSGeo projects. Adopting a good Code-Of-Conduct consolidates expectations about respectful behaviour at events and forums, ensuring they are safe, welcoming and productive and helps communities discretely address indiscretions should they occur.

    • Open Hardware

Leftovers

  • After ‘One Year In Orbit,’ Russian Search Engine Sputnik Finds Few Users

    Russia’s new search engine hasn’t found many users.

    Created a year ago as part of a Kremlin effort to exert more control over the Internet, the search engine was given the high-flying name of the Soviet satellite that beat the United States into space in 1957: Sputnik.

  • Hardware

    • Tablet shipments lose momentum; Total PC unit forecast downgraded

      IC Insights will release its Update to the 2015 IC Market Drivers report in June. The Update includes revisions to IC market conditions and forecasts for the 2015 2018 automotive, smartphone, personal computer and tablet markets, as well as an update to the market for the Internet of Things. This bulletin reviews IC Insights’ 2015 unit shipment forecast for total personal computing unit shipments.

    • Fraunhofer study: software thin clients are both climate and wallet-friendly

      As part of a study commissioned by IGEL Technology, the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology (UMSICHT) carried out research into various different approaches for IT work stations in terms of their impact on the climate and cost effectiveness. The researchers compared new PCs and notebooks with older devices, which continue to be operated as software-based thin clients. The researchers found that over the entire life cycle of a three-year operating phase, software thin clients reduced global warming potential by up to 60%, and cut overall costs by up to 47%.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Tobacco industry accused of fueling cigarette smuggling to boost profits

      The tobacco industry has been accused of “appalling hypocrisy”, amid claims that it is fuelling the illicit trade in cigarette smuggling to bolster its arguments against tax increases and other anti-smoking measures.

      In a report published to coincide with World No Tobacco Day, the pressure group ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) claimed that some tobacco companies are flooding foreign markets with more products than there is demand.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Top Bush Era CIA Official Just Confirmed the Iraq War Was Based On Lies

      Michael Morell’s stint with the CIA included deputy and acting director, but during the time preceding the US invasion of Iraq, he helped prepare daily intelligence briefings for Bush. One of those briefings, from October 2002, is an infamous example in intelligence history as how not to compile a report. This National Intelligence Estimate, titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction”, was the ostensibly flawed intelligence cited continuously by Bush supporters as justification to pursue a war of aggression against Iraq. However, this claim is dubious at best, and serves more as a smokescreen to lend credence to a president who was otherwise hellbent on revenge against Saddam Hussein, as evidenced in his statement a month before the report, “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

    • The New York Times calls for blood in Iraq-Syria war

      The New York Times published a major front-page critique Tuesday of the Obama administration’s military tactics in the air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The article quotes several US and Iraqi military and intelligence officials, most of them unnamed, denouncing the supposed restraint on bombing due to excessive fears of killing civilians.

    • ‘Obama at War’ Shows How Syria Was Lost

      Meanwhile, Smith reports, “The administration’s training program has been severely delayed. Only 90 rebels have taken part so far. And the Pentagon now says the first 5,000 rebels won’t be vetted and ready until the end of this year at the earliest.”

    • Getting the CIA — and Secrecy — Out of the Drone Program

      President Barack Obama’s disclosure last month of the death of two hostages in a January drone strike offered the public a brief glimpse of the tragic consequences of the government’s clandestine drone killing program. We cannot know how commonplace these kinds of civilian casualties are because of the government’s selective secrecy on the program. But now, Congress has an opportunity to weigh in.

    • Pentagon report says West, Gulf states and Turkey foresaw emergence of ‘IS’

      A newly declassified Pentagon report provides startling high-level confirmation that the US-led strategy in Syria contributed directly to the rise of the Islamic State (IS).

    • Iran’s military mastermind: Only Iran is confronting ISIS

      The general in charge of Iran’s paramilitary activities in the Middle East said the United States and other powers were failing to confront Islamic State, and only Iran was committed to the task, a news agency on Monday reported.

    • Pentagon Report Predicted West’s Support for Islamist Rebels Would Create ISIS

      A declassified secret US government document obtained by the conservative public interest law firm, Judicial Watch, shows that Western governments deliberately allied with al-Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups to topple Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad.

    • Obama ordered CIA to train ISIS jihadists: Declassified documents

      U.S. intelligence documents released to a government watchdog confirms the suspicions that the United States and some of its so-called coalition partners had actually facilitated the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an effective adversary against the government of the Syrian dictator President Bashar al-Assad. In addition, ISIS members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at facilities in Jordan in 2012. The original goal was to weaken the Syrian government which had engaged in war crimes against their own people, according to a number of reports on Sunday.

    • The Benghazi outrage we actually should be talking about

      Newly revealed documents show how the CIA stood by as arms shipments from Libya enabled the rise of ISIS

    • Ex-CIA operative, author to speak to New Mexico graduates

      In 2003, Valerie Plame was exposed as a CIA operative by officials of the George W. Bush administration in an effort to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, a former ambassador who had criticized the decision to invade Iraq.

    • Senior Al Shabaab Commander wanted by CIA dies in Somalia

      A Senior Al Shabaab commander wanted by CIA has died in Southern Somalia. Somalia based group, Al Shabaab said.

    • Sanders has been a longtime critic of CIA covert actions

      An interview televised by CSPAN in 1989, when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sen. Bernie Sanders gave a stinging criticism of American covert actions to undermining socialist governments in Latin American countries.

      “If you trace the history of the United States vis a vis Latin America and Central America, there has never been a time where a country made a revolution for the poor people where it was not overthrown by the CIA or the United States government, or the marines,” Sanders said.

    • ‘Sudden Justice’ – an interview with Chris Woods on drone warfare.

      Much of Wood’s research has uncovered how the ‘war on terror’ has been a ‘tit-for-tat’ affair. Extraordinary rendition, began under Clinton, and resulted in alleged militants from Bosnia and Albania being taken to Egypt where they were tortured. One of these militants was the brother of the Al Qaeda Number Two El-Zawahiri, who subsequently ordered an attack on the US in Tanzania in revenge. In response, Clinton’s government put Osama bin Laden on the kill list. 9/11 soon followed, with the first US targetted drone strike happening a month later.

    • Drone Warfare

      With Chris Woods, investigative journalist and author of the book Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars.

    • Far from facing the truth, the US is telling new lies about Iraq

      A couple of weeks ago, the Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush was asked in an interview with Fox News whether, knowing what he knows now, he would have invaded Iraq. It’s the kind of predictable question for which most people assumed he would have a coherent answer. They were wrong. Jeb blew it. “I would have [authorised the invasion],” he said. “And so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody. And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”

    • American leadership should be like Putin – Iraq War veteran

      Iraq seems to be losing the war with Islamic State (IS). Its army is retreating as the jihadists speed up their advance, with reinforcements coming from all across the globe, volunteers bolstering the extremists’ ranks. Airstrikes don’t seem to halt the offensive – either in Iraq and Syria. Isn’t this the time for the world to act? Shouldn’t the US do something decisive on the matter – given some claims that it’s America’s fault IS even came into existence in the first place. What should be done, what could’ve been done, and what should never have been done in the War on Terror?

    • Do the Right Thing

      How can we foresee unexpected situations before the fact? Mr. Mudd suggests what he calls “right-to-left thinking,” or asking completely different questions related to what we don’t know about a problem, instead of what we do know— Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “known unknowns.” For example, current analysts at the CIA might ask: Where is ISIS going to strike next? We know that the Islamist group will attack somewhere, but the where and when are unknown.

      But what about the “unknown unknowns,” things that we don’t even know that we don’t know? For this problem, Mr. Mudd believes a good leader needs to call in a “fresh team” of renegade thinkers who will purposefully challenge prevailing ideas, popular leaders and establishment traditionalists locked into the known unknowns. The renegades aren’t just playing devil’s advocate, or joining the contemporary equivalent of President Lincoln’s “team of rivals,” because that means staying within the boundaries of what is known about the unknown. To get to the unknown unknowns (assuming that they’re knowable in principle, if not in practice), you need to think outside parameters of convention, and this usually means bringing in outsiders and giving them a chance to be heard.

    • Finding support for invasion of Iraq is stretch

      In her Wednesday letter “ Army should avoid politics, do right thing,” Sylvia Bower began and ended her comments that the government “should acknowledge that Bush was right and there were WMD.” The writer’s premise and conclusion don’t agree with history and miss the point of the article.

    • Bob Woodward: George W. Bush did not lie about WMDs to get into Iraq War

      Former President George W. Bush did not lie about weapons of mass destruction to justify a war with Iraq, journalist Bob Woodward said in a segment on “Fox News Sunday.”

    • The Long, Long Fall of Bob Woodward

      This week many liberals gasped when Bob Woodward showed up on Fox News to defend George Bush and Dick Cheney’s prosecution of the Iraq War. Woodward told Chris Wallace that neither Bush nor Cheney lied about Iraq’s WMDs, that the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons wasn’t seriously flawed and that the disastrous war against Saddam Hussein was probably justified.

    • The Fox Political Cult

      Probably the most infamous cases of mass mind control involves religious cults, with the People’s Temple Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, South America being the most tragic. In 1978, Jim Jones, most likely suffering from megalomania, forced 912 followers into committing mass suicide. Attempts to rescue the followers, ultimately by a member of the US House of Representatives, ended in the representative’s murder and the deaths of all sect members.

      The totality of Jim Jones’ control was blamed on a religious extremism administered through a charismatic leader with a regimen of 24/7 control of mind and body. In today’s world, religious cultism is not dead, but is still a problem.

      There is a more extensive form of mind control involving millions of Americans, not in the religious sense but in the political sense. There is no immediate threat of death for humans but, in effect, a deadly threat to a democracy founded well over 200 years ago, the American experiment in democracy.

      We are speaking of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which has potential access to a global audience of 4.7 billion people, three-fourths of the world’s population. Its Fox News Channel acts as the ultimate political cult in the United States.

    • Judith Miller’s Comeback

      Miller was renowned as a Times national-security reporter prior to 9/11, achieved stardom as the face of the pro-war propaganda effort prior to the Iraq invasion, and then became a household name all over the world once it was discovered she’d made the most impactful mistake the media business had ever seen.

    • Time for a frank discussion on the Iraq war

      There was a segment on America’s crumbling infrastructure on 60 Minutes last night. Congress, even Congress, recognizes the problem, if not its full gravity. They say, not without reason, that funding infrastructure overhaul is expensive and we can’t pay for it. With the Bush tax laws this is a problem. With the staggering cost of the American invasion of Iraq addressing America’s urgent domestic issues is a huge problem. Our inner cities fester and our bridges and highways are crumbling, to mention but two infrastructure problems.

    • Resurgence of the ‘Surge’ Myth

      Official Washington loves the story – the Iraq War was failing until President George W. Bush bravely ordered a “surge” in 2007 that won the war, but President Obama squandered the victory, requiring a new “surge” now. Except the narrative is dangerous make-believe, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • ISIS: An Inside Job?

      Poor Jeb! Being even less informed than his ambusher, he could only “respectfully disagree” and reiterate the neocon party line: if only we’d kept more troops in longer ISIS wouldn’t have coalesced. “You can rewrite history all you want,” he said, with a sigh, “but the simple fact is we’re in a much more unstable place because America pulled back.”

    • Why the Saudis just blacklisted two Lebanese militants

      This week, Saudi Arabia just sanctioned two senior Hezbollah members, Khalil Harb and Muhammad Qabalan, for “terrorist actions.” Both operatives have long Hezbollah resumes, but they stand out for playing leadership roles overseeing Hezbollah’s operations in one particular region: the Middle East. Tellingly, the decision to blacklist these two Hezbollah operatives comes in the wake of Hezbollah threats that Saudi Arabia would “incur very serious losses” and “pay a heavy price” as a result of its Yemen campaign. Given Hezbollah’s recent investment in expanding its regional presence and operations, the Saudis are taking these threats seriously.

    • Heirs of the ‘Secret War’ in Laos

      On the morning of May 14, 1975, in a valley of limestone, sinkholes and caves, the end was drawing near. The discarded possessions of those who had fled were everywhere: suitcases, shoes, wrinkled blouses. This was Long Tieng, a secret military air base established by the Central Intelligence Agency from where it led clandestine operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.

    • Henry Kissinger Just Turned 92. Here’s Why He’s Careful About Where He Travels.

      As Henry Kissinger turns 92, the former uber-diplomat still enjoys international prestige for his many career accomplishments. Still, there are wide areas of the globe he steers clear of — the better to avoid questioning in connection with war crimes.

      As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon and then Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford, Kissinger was known for his realpolitik approach to foreign policy. In the context of the Cold War, that often meant employing ruthless means to undermine perceived U.S. enemies and bolster allies. It is perhaps no coincidence that Kissinger has gone to great lengths to argue that countries cannot prosecute a world leader for crimes against humanity committed in a third country.

      Below are some of the most glaring examples of foreign policy decisions Kissinger made — from Vietnam to Chile — that violated human rights.

    • U.S. defense chief to China: End South China Sea expansion

      As China rapidly builds new artificial islands in the South China Sea to expand its territory claim there, Washington is adamantly refusing to recognize those claims.

      On Saturday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter called for “an immediate and lasting halt” to the practice.

    • Bin Laden killing in 2011: a ‘Volcano of Lies’!

      In the May 21st 2015 issue of the London Review of Books, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who, in 1969, first exposed the ghastly My Lai massacre by US forces during the Vietnam War, published an new account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden which exposed the story told by the Obama Administration to be, as he put it, “a blatant lie.”

      Using sources inside the CIA and Pakistani intelligence, Hersh dismantled, plank-by-plank, the official narrative first paraded by President Obama in his public address a few hours after the raid in Abbottabad and later embellished by John Brennan.

      Hersh’s revelations establish that at the time of the raid Bin Laden was essentially an invalid. He was living under a sort of ‘house-arrest’ by the Pakistanis, who were monitoring him 24/7. US intelligence was alerted to Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad by a ‘walk-in’ informant who wanted to collect (and, in fact, did) a portion of the $25 million ‘reward’ that was on offer.

    • Judge Who Blocked Release of Osama bin Laden Death Photos Now Blocks Release of Senate Torture Report

      A federal judge has thwarted an attempt to force the release of the Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture program.

      The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s full report on the CIA interrogation program. The executive summary of the report was previously made public, albeit with numerous redactions.

      But U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg rejected the ACLU’s request, ruling the report remains a congressional record and thus isn’t subject to the FOIA. When Congress created FOIA in 1966, it made sure to exempt the legislative branch from its provisions.

    • Osama’s ghost comes back to haunt US

      Much as the U.S. did that night by projecting Osama’s killing as an act of victory. By killing a terrorist who had long lost his relevance even in the eyes of his most serious backers, the only point U.S. President Barack Obama was trying to make was that killing an individual could compensate for not being able to address the circumstances that made his terror network flourish.

      [...]

      The same narrative later played out in Libya, where the intervening nations were more intent on finishing off Qaddafi than stabilising the country. The same story is gaining traction in the case of Syria, where the West’s recalcitrance on dealing with Assad has led to Islamic State gaining greater foothold, to a point now where it controls almost half its territory. The farce that played out in Libya is being repeated now in Syria and Yemen. We wonder if Osama’s ghost has been wilfully kept alive.

    • White lies

      The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh takes apart several important pieces of the U.S. narrative on the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan in 2011.

      [...]

      Hersh alleges that Saudi Arabia paid for bin Laden’s accommodation. This is unverified but not improbable. More than anything, the Saudis wanted bin Laden silent, either under house arrest in Pakistan with no connection to the outside world, or dead. Their money got the former; the U.S. did the latter. The world did not get to hear of bin Laden’s account of who funded him and groomed him during the 1990s and early 2000s.

    • Celerier: Pandering to our enemies

      Meanwhile, we pander to our greatest enemies in the Middle East: Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which support terrorism and allow no human rights within their borders. This policy is both absurd and repugnant. Our policy should be to take sides with Assad before it is too late and help him destroy the terrorists. Then we must take Saudi Arabia to task for its contemptible acts against civilization.

    • “Death in the Congo” highlights obscure subject: African liberation

      The struggle for African liberation, often spearheaded by socialist, left-leaning national liberation movements, is an important part of African history. Many figures loom large as part of this history, including Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo.

      Young and charismatic, Lumumba endeared himself to the emerging national liberation movement, while trying to balance conflicting needs and agendas in a country largely controlled by Belgium financial interests – even after independence.

    • Bangladesh Says Coca-Cola Unit Manager Tied to Islamic State

      Bangladeshi authorities arrested two men suspected of being recruiters for the Islamic State, police said, one of whom works for a local unit of the Coca-Cola Co.

    • Turkey says US agrees to provide air cover for anti-Assad “rebels” in Syria

      Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Monday that the US had agreed to provide air support for so-called “moderate rebels” being trained in Turkey, once they cross the border into Syria.

      Cavusoglu told the Daily Sabah that there was “a principle agreement” between the two governments for Washington to provide air cover for the proxy forces being trained in a US-funded program aimed at toppling the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

    • Turkey, US to provide air protection for moderate Syrian opposition forces

      Foreign Minister Mevlut Çavuşoğlu, speaking to Daily Sabah in an exclusive interview while attending the fifth MIKTA Foreign Ministers Meeting in Seoul, said the moderate Syrian opposition forces that will be part of the train and equip program in Kırşehir won’t be abandoned once they are back in Syria. He said ignoring their plight once in Syria was against what the program wanted to achieve, adding that the U.S. and Turkey had agreed in principle to provide the trained and equipped moderate forces with air protection in Syria. He said that the air cover for trained Syrian forces was not part of the comprehensive plan put forward by Turkey that included setting up no-fly zones and safe zones in Syria. On the issue of Rohingya refugees, he said Turkey was in close contact with Indonesia and Malaysia, which are also MIKTA members, adding that the government had donated $1 million to help the refugees. The foreign minister also remarked on the start of the latest round of Cyprus unification talks, noting that Turkey was more determined than ever to resolve the issue. The current positive climate created by the resumption of talks needed to last, he said.

    • The American Mainstream Media – A Classic Tale of Propaganda

      The US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO’s 1999 Kosovo campaign was no accident.

    • The Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Reconsidered

      When I was in Beijing during the protests in 1989, a middle-aged man came up to me and asked, “Couldn’t America send some B-52s here and…” and he made a swooping motion with his hand.

      Ten years later, on May 7, 1999, the American bombers did show up.

      Instead of showering freedom ordnance on China’s dictators, however, they dropped five bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

      As to why this happened, the United States has always declared it was an accident.

    • Ted Yoho Leads a Coalition to Ensure Only DOD Handles Drones

      Teaming up with conservatives, libertarians and liberals, at the end of last week U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., continued his fight to ensure authority over armed drones remains solely with the Department of Defense (DOD), as he brought back the “Drone Reform Act (DRA)” on Friday.

    • Germany and US Drones

      Germany should make sure that Ramstein is not used for illegal attacks

    • German Court Turns Down Drone Lawsuit but Leaves Door Open to Others
    • Court rejects Yemenis’ case against Germany over US drones

      A German court on Wednesday rejected a lawsuit against the government brought by three Yemeni men who lost two relatives in a U.S. drone strike.

      The men, who were unable to leave Yemen to attend the hearing, alleged in their suit that the German government let the United States use an air base in southern Germany to relay flight control data for lethal drone strikes, including the 2012 attack in which their relatives were killed.

    • Court hears Yemenis’ case against Germany over US drone strike that killed 2 relatives
    • Yemeni Claim that Germany Helped US Drone Strikes Dismissed
    • Court rejects case against US drone strikes
    • German court to begin hearing in Yemen drone case
    • German court hears case into US drone killings in Yemen
    • Family Of American Drone Victims Vow To Fight German Court Ruling
    • German court set to hear testimony from family of Yemeni drone victim
    • Yemenis Are Taking Germany to Court Over US Drone Strikes
    • Court rejects Yemenis’ case against Germany over US drone strike that killed 2 relatives
    • Court dismisses claim of German complicity in Yemeni drone killings
    • German court rejects Yemen drone case
    • Drone War: German Court Throws Out Case by Family of Slain Yeminis
    • German court rejects Yemenis’ case over US drone killings
    • German court rejects complaint from Yemeni drone victims
    • German court case centers on Ramstein’s possible role in drone attack
    • Yemeni Claim that Germany Helped US Drone Strikes Dismissed
    • ‘US Can Do Whatever It Wants on German Soil’: German MP on Ramstein Base
    • Court dismisses Yemenis’ case over German role in US drone strikes
    • German Court Rejects Case Brought by U.S. Drone Strike Victims’ Family

      A German court in Cologne has rejected the lawsuit of a Yemeni family whose two relatives died in a U.S. drone strike.

    • Andrew Cockburn chronicles how U.S. drones complete Obama’s Kill Chain

      The United States military’s desire to kill without putting its soldiers at risk began earlier than many realize. In Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, veteran Washington reporter Andrew Cockburn begins the story of America’s modern assassination program in the 1960s, on the Ho Chi Minh trail in North Vietnam.

    • The debate on lethal robots is starting too late
    • Beyond drone warfare: Prof warns of ‘automated killing machines’
    • Drones deciding on their own when to kill? No thanks
    • Who will police the killer robots?
    • DARPA’s Autonomous Robots might Do More Damage than Good
    • DARPA’s ‘killer robots’ technology can leave humans ‘utterly defenseless’
    • US Military Developing Killer Robots For War
    • US air force embraces sci-fi technology in a dynamic shift in advanced weaponry

      From Artificial Intelligence, drones and the Internet of Things – the US army also has something clever up their sleeves and it’s no messing around with this new weapon of defense.

    • DARPA tests laser weapon for fighters, drones

      The U.S military will come one step closer to its dream of arming fighter jets with ray guns this summer, as DARPA shifts one of its hottest laser projects onto White Sands Missile range for field tests.

    • Drone warfare gone awry…

      Victims of drones are living witnesses of the US’ barbaric policies, brutalities and indiscriminate killing of civilians.

    • Casualties and Polls: Some Observations

      Ryan, who I don’t believe opposes drone technology per se, nevertheless criticizes the many surveys that consistently show solid U.S. support for drones because they “fail to seek information about public attitudes in the face of drone operations that, in reality, often cause civilian deaths.” He is right to conclude that, logically, public support declines when civilian casualties are involved, and he is also right to critique the polls. I do disagree, however, with the popular assumption (and not just Ryan’s) that “in reality” drone strikes “often” cause civilian casualties.

    • The Kill List: ICWatch Uses LinkedIn Account Info to Out Officials Who Aided Assassination Program

      WikiLeaks has begun hosting a new database called ICWatch, built by Transparency Toolkit. The site includes a searchable database of 27,000 LinkedIn profiles of people in the intelligence community. Organizers say the aim of the site is to “watch the watchers.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange talks about how the database could be used to help identify individuals connected to the U.S. kill list, formally known as the Joint Prioritized Effects List, or JPEL.

    • ICWatch Uses LinkedIn Information to Out Officials Who Aided Assassination Program
    • Death From Above

      This formula is repeated throughout the rest of the book. That is 1) There is a military problem 2) Someone always tries to find a technological solution, and then 3) Spends a lot of money only to find out the U.S. has made the problem worse.

    • Why a Muslim Peace Hero May Not Be Welcome

      Speaking in my hometown, Oxford, on Tuesday, Qatar’s Shaikha Moza told an audience at the university that Muslims are being “dehumanised” by Western media coverage of violent Islamic extremism and identified as “something fearful and unknowable”.

      I have to agree and do not consider this phenomenon to be particularly new. The British tabloids have worked hard to present Muslims at home and abroad as backward and hostile. I imagine this makes it easier to kill them when we send bombs and armed drones into Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

    • American prisoner’s fate unknown after deadly air strikes on Yemen jail

      Fears are growing over the fate of an American citizen trapped in a Yemeni military prison after a Saudi air strike bombed the compound where his lawyers believe he is held.

    • Podcast: The Case of Sharif Mobley, Detained American Possibly Killed in Saudi Attack in Yemen

      Sharif Mobley is a US citizen, who was kidnapped in Yemen and has been in detention for five years. The FBI is known to have interrogated him. His life has been increasingly endangered as war rages in Yemen, and this past week the military compound, where he has been held, was bombed.

    • Public Opinion, International Law, and Drone Strikes: Some Reflections

      We commend Professor Charles Dunlap for his excellent recent post on international law and public support for drone strikes. As he notes, there are many points of agreement between him, Professor Goodman, and ourselves, primarily that when it comes to drone strikes, the American public is interested not just in being safe, but in being compliant with international law. Of course, he points to a number of differences and we appreciate the opportunity to respond to what we take to be the main criticisms he raises.

    • Justice Department issues policy on domestic drone use

      The Justice Department is acknowledging that the FBI, DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies are likely to make increasing use of unmanned aerial drones in the United States.

    • NYT Trumpets U.S. Restraint against ISIS, Ignores Hundreds of Civilian Deaths

      The article claims that “the campaign has killed an estimated 12,500 fighters” and “has achieved several successes in conducting about 4,200 strikes that have dropped about 14,000 bombs and other weapons.” But an anonymous American pilot nonetheless complains that “we have not taken the fight to these guys,” and says he “cannot get authority” to drone-bomb targets without excessive proof that no civilians will be endangered. Despite the criticisms, Schmitt writes, “administration officials stand by their overriding objective to prevent civilian casualties.”

    • Humanizing War and the Dangers of Drone Warfare

      Though war is one of the greatest scourges of humanity, the Church has always sought to humanize war, as much as this is possible. This effort faces a new challenge with the rise of drone warfare, now in nascent stage. The USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace has just released its second letter in two years on the topic. What does it mean to humanize war? How has this challenge become more difficult? I will briefly examine these questions before introducing the important contribution of these two letters from the bishops.

    • The U.S. Navy’s Big Mistake — Building Tons of Supercarriers

      The Pentagon behaves as if aircraft carriers will rule forever … they won’t

    • Hawks of a Feather

      The glaring exception to all this hawkishness, of course, is Rand Paul, the libertarian senator who made his mark in 2013 with a filibuster protesting the American policy of using drones to kill Americans engaging in terrorism overseas. Paul was absent from Oklahoma City last month, busy with another filibuster to stop the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program. Days later, in an interview on MSNBC, the Kentucky senator lambasted the “hawks in our party” for policies that he said have allowed the terrorist group ISIS to “exist and grow.”

    • Dying in Vain at Home is No Different Than Abroad

      Just to round out this discussion of dying in vain and to give the concept a domestic feel, here is something to think about: Black men aged 20-34 died at a higher rate in Philadelphia in 2002 than in the military in Iraq from 2003-06 at the height of the US war there. Now that is real dying in vain, and a dying in vain that seems to grind on every day in America’s urban areas.

    • 30 Years Later: The Bombing Of MOVE Part 2

      Jared Ball and Bashi Rose continue their coverage of the May 13th Commemoration of the 1985 Bombing of MOVE

    • The weapons of war

      A century ago, the world witnessed the first use of weapons of mass destruction. On April 22, 1915, the German High Command launched their first chlorine attack with a bombardment of the trenches on the Western Front, sending a thick yellow cloud floating towards the French and Canadian lines. Its effects were horrific even by the standards of the trenches. Chlorine burnt the throat and destroyed the lining of the lungs. Many drowned in their own bodily fluids.

    • Activists condemn Swiss drone deal with Israel

      Swiss activists started a campaign on Tuesday against an official deal between their country and Israel through which Switzerland is to buy drones, Quds Press has reported. The first protest took place outside Switzerland’s largest military base.

    • The Vocabulary of War Criminals

      In the land of American exceptionalism, bipartisan political leaders make “mistakes” in foreign policy; they do not commit war crimes. The invasion of Iraq offers a much needed case study; and the brother of the president who launched the invasion sets the stage.

    • Taking Responsibility For Drone Killings- President Obama And The Fog Of War

      When President Barack Obama apologized on April 23 to the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an American and an Italian, both hostages killed in a drone attack in Pakistan in January, he blamed their tragic deaths on the “fog of war.”

    • TV ads urge Syracuse drone pilots to refuse flying over Afghanistan

      A coalition of peace groups began airing TV ads in Syracuse this week urging pilots from the 174th Attack Wing at Hancock Field in Mattydale to stop flying their remotely-piloted drones over Afghanistan.

      The 15-second TV ads are critical of the attacks carried out by the New York Air National Guard’s MQ-9 Reaper drones operated by the attack wing.

      “Drone pilots: Please refuse to fly,” the ads say. “No one has to obey an immoral law.”

    • Families Press for Changes in Policy on Hostages

      Mr. Obama, she said, also conceded that his administration had failed her. “That was the least he could do,” Mrs. Foley said in an interview this week. “That was hopeful. I recognize that the administration feels badly it was not handled well and it was not given the priority it should have had.”

    • The Foreign Policy Essay: Just How Effective is the U.S. Drone Program Anyway?

      While these announcements represent an uncommon acknowledgement of casualties from drones, notably absent from these remarks was the acknowledgement that Weinstein and Lo Porto were indeed killed by a drone strike, the specific location of the strike, and which government agency was responsible for conducting the strike. Even in a moment of apparent transparency, the U.S. government was opaque.

    • RAF Waddington drone protesters’ trial put back until later this year

      The trial of four protesters who allegedly cut the perimeter fence at RAF Waddington and walked onto the base has been postponed until October.

      The defendants, members of the End The Drone Wars group, were arrested on January 5 following their protest against the use of unmanned Reaper ‘drones’ in the Middle East, remotely piloted from Waddington.

      Christopher Cole, 51, from Oxford, Gary Eagling, 52, from Nottingham, Dr Katharina Karcher, 31, from Coventry, and Penelope Walker, 64, from Leicester, all deny criminal damage.

    • The Interpreter on terrorism and dual citizenship

      Given yesterday’s announcement by the Prime Minister that his Government would legislate within weeks to revoke Australian citizenship from dual-nationality terrorists, it is worth revisiting three Interpreter pieces on whether this is a useful weapon in the fight against terrorism.

    • Interactive map shows details of every bomb that hit Aberdeen in World War II

      Recalling historical dates in chronological order might not be everyone’s party trick, but a new online map has just made gathering World War II knowledge a little easier. Powered by Google, the digital tool highlights the areas of Aberdeen which fell victim to the air raids of the 1940s – and the dates of when they were hit.

    • Memorial Day Heroes: “Thank You For Your Service”…On Second Thought

      It is Memorial Day again. Some will celebrate. Some will drink too much. Some will march in parades. Some will rally around the flag. Some will go shopping. Some will mourn. I am among the mourners. I mourn mostly for those we have killed — and I mourn for those we haven’t killed yet, but will in the days ahead. I mourn for all of the mothers and fathers who put their children to bed at night and wonder if this will be the night that they are killed by a drone attack.

      I mourn for the 500,000 Iraqi children – dead because of U.S. foreign policy. The official policy as described by Madeleine Albright on 60 Minutes was ‘that we think the price was worth it.’ Worth it to whom? Not to the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandmothers and grandfathers of those children.

    • Gaza Strip: Israel to open investigation into Palestinian Bedouin sisters’ death near Khan Younis

      The deaths of Hakema Abu Adwan, 66, and Nadjah Abu Adwan, 47, was first documented by soldiers in the report in early May, when it was claimed the sisters were shot dead on 22 July by Israeli forces who then listed them as terrorists despite knowing that they were civilians.

    • Catch 22 at the German Embassy

      In an aggressive move, one of the demonstrators repeatedly forced a list of children killed by U.S. drone strikes into the embassy “janitorial” staff’s view.

    • A Civilian Is A Combatant Is A Civilian Is A Combatant

      The researchers found that many people who have lived where wars are fought have taken part in those wars in one way or another, and that they have no clear understanding (not that anyone else does) of when they have been civilians and when combatants. Said one interviewee, highlighted as typical: “What I think is that there is no line at all. . . . Civilians can turn into fighters at any time. Anybody can change from a fighter to a civilian, all in one day, in one moment.”

      The interviewees made clear that many are forced into participation in war, others have very little choice, and others join in for reasons not too different from those expressed by the Pentagon: primarily self-defense, but also patriotism, prestige, survival, civic duty, social standing, outrage at the targeting of peaceful protesters, and financial gain. Bizarrely, not a single interviewee said they joined in a war in order to prevent Americans from going shopping after church or otherwise continuing with their lifestyle or freedoms.

    • Albania and Serbia vow to work for Balkans’ stability

      At the heart of the mutual friction was Kosovo, the former Serbian province with an ethnic Albanian majority which unilaterally declared independence in 2008.

    • Neocons: The Men of Dementia

      So it happened also that when our modern heroes rode through the deserts of the Middle East, they saw a robust fellow (Iraq) mistreating a little fellow (Kuwait). When our heroes accosted him, the big fellow said that the little fellow was stealing his oil and not helping him protect his flock (the Arab nations) from the advancing Iranians. So Iraq, who had no money “with him” as Cervantes says of the lout Don Quixote encountered, said he could not pay Kuwait what it owed it.

    • Colorado theater shooting victims relive terror in courtroom

      From the witness stand, Christina Blache could finally do what she had most wanted and most feared: She looked for the first time at the man who shot her, who killed her friend, who ravaged so many lives.

      Her muscles tensed. Her nerves tingled. She fought back tears.

    • Kurdish women’s militia takes a stand for Ras al Ayn

      Nujaan, who is 27 and has been a soldier for four years, says that Isis’s “target is women”. She says: “Look at Shingal [in Iraq] where they raped the women and massacred the men. It is a matter of honour to defend ourselves first, and then our families and lands.” Sitting beside her is Zenya, 22, who adds that she also “is fighting for myself and my family”.

    • US Military and Civilians Are Increasingly Divided

      While the U.S. waged a war in Vietnam 50 years ago with 2.7 million men conscripted from every segment of society, less than one-half of 1 percent of the U.S. population is in the armed services today — the lowest rate since World War II. America’s recent wars are authorized by a U.S. Congress whose members have the lowest rate of military service in history, led by three successive commanders in chief who never served on active duty.

    • Chinese embassy in Pakistan verifying hostage video

      The Chinese embassy in Pakistan is attempting to verify reports of a video purporting to show a Chinese kidnapped by Taliban-allied fighters in Pakistan a year ago asking Beijing to help secure his release.

      Chinese in Pakistan have been told to be on the alert, despite the security situation improving this year.

    • Video surfaces of a kidnapped Chinese tourist in Pakistan

      A militant video released Sunday purported to show a Chinese tourist kidnapped by Taliban-allied fighters in Pakistan a year ago asking for his government to help him be released.

      A militant known to belong to a Taliban splinter group called Jaish Al-Hadeed, or the “Contingent of Steel,” gave the video to The Associated Press. While it could not be independently verified by the AP, the man in the video resembled other known photographs of Hong Xudong, kidnapped in May 2014.

    • Video of Chinese hostage could prove embarrassing for Pakistan

      An armed militia group in Pakistan with links to the Taliban released a video of a Chinese tourist they announced that they kidnapped last year, according to Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily.

      In the video, the hostage asked the Chinese government to pay the ransom or his captors would execute him, but did not specify the sum of money. The hostage also criticized the Pakistani government, stating that they only care about money and had made no attempt to rescue him, the paper said.

    • The Global Elite’s Crimes Against Humanity

      Virtually every government in the world creates an illusion for its people. Take economic policy. Government policies might hurt us in the short term, but we are all on a one way route to the ‘promised land’ of happiness, or so we are told by the politicians, the corporate media and spokespersons for the ones who make us suffer to ensure they never have to – the privileged elite, the ruling class.

    • ISIS vs 3D printing

      Time and again, conflict has been bad news for historical artifacts and sculptures. There was the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the Nazi’s battle to burn as much “degenerate art” as they could find. Swept up in a violent fervor, mobs and soldiers have been quick to destroy what took societies centuries to create; what museums and collectors spent decades collecting, preserving, and documenting for the public.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CIA Hordes Climate Data from Scientists

      In other words, MEDEA was a program that scientists relied on to get accurate and classified climate data — and now it is gone. But why?

    • Awkward: CIA Shuts Down Climate Research Program After Obama Frames Climate Change as National Security Threat
    • CIA Stops Sharing Climate Change Info With Scientists

      In a recent speech, President Obama proclaimed that climate change “constitutes a serious threat to global security (and), an immediate risk to our national security,” and warned that it actually could exacerbate other menaces, such as terrorism and political instability.

      “Severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram,” Obama said. “It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.”

      But even as the White House is affirming its focus, the CIA reportedly is ending a key program that shared the agency’s climate change data — some of it gathered by surveillance satellites and other clandestine sources.

    • The CIA shuts down program that gives scientists access to vital climate change data

      The CIA will no longer allow climate change scientists to access data from spy satellites and submarines in order to study global warming. Prior to the announcement, scientists could study global warming data in extreme detail thanks to a program, called MEDEA — Measurement of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis. Now the CIA is shutting down the program, saying that there is no longer a need to study the implications of climate change.

    • CIA Ends Information Sharing with Climate Scientists

      The CIA began the program in 1992 under President George H. W. Bush, whose son George W. Bush, as president, shut down MEDEA. In 2010, President Barack Obama revived the program along with establishing a new CIA office, Center for Climate Change and National Security. That office was shut down without explanation in 2012.

    • Gelderland uses ‘neck breaker’ to kill geese at €13.50 a bird

      Gelderland provincial council has given a €22,000 contract to a small pest control company to kill 1,600 geese using a controversial method of breaking the birds’ necks.

      Despite the cost of €13.75 per bird, no-one has seen if or how the method works and the province does not plan to check up on the work or animal welfare issues, the AD reports.

      The contract has been awarded to a company named V&T, based in Leerdam but details about how the neck breaker will work are sketchy.

      The method, known as cervical dislocation, involves snapping the birds’ necks one by one. According to the local broadcaster Omroep Gelderland, the bird’s neck is placed between two blocks and then broken, resulting in a ‘stress-free and painless death’.

    • What Will the Refugio Oil Spill Kill?

      Since last Tuesday’s oil spill, more than 20,000 gallons of death-dealing crude has sickened or killed pelicans, cormorants, grebes, dolphins, sea lions, elephant seals, bass, guitarfish, spiny lobsters, rock crabs, urchins, octopi, shrimp, mussels, sea hares, sponges, anemones, coral, and whole swaths of smaller sea life along the long-protected and once-pristine Gaviota Coast.

    • 4 more bodies found after Texas flooding

      Authorities said Friday they reclaimed four more bodies from Texas waters, adding to the growing death toll inflicted by record-setting storms that continue to submerge highways and flood homes.

    • Texas, Okla. Flooding Kills 19, More Rain Expected

      Floodwaters deepened across much of Texas on Tuesday as storms dumped almost another foot of rain on the Houston area, stranding hundreds of motorists and inundating the famously congested highways that serve the nation’s fourth-largest city.

  • Finance

    • Germany: many strikes and a big scandal

      Was the German working class suddenly turning super-militant? Some may have been fearful, some hopeful that on the rail lines and elsewhere the old IWW-Wobbly song from 1915-USA, “Solidarity Forever” was literally coming true: “… without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.”

      The strike of locomotive engineers stopped freight cars May 19 and passenger traffic the next day. Unlike eight previous strikes by the same union, the strike was not for 30 hours, 42 hours or six days – but with no end date. Although the state-owned but largely independently-run railroad company tried to maintain a skeleton schedule, two-thirds of the wheels stopped turning; also city rail service was cut by 40 to 85 percent. In Berlin the crucial “S-Bahn” elevated system tried hard to achieve at least 20-minute intervals on main routes. Subway, bus and tram lines were unaffected – but overfilled.

    • Disgraced general David Petraeus is now being rolled out by private equity firm in a bid to impress potential new clients

      Former CIA director’s name recognition has become way for company KKR to help attract big name clients from country’s richest families

    • KKR rolls out ex-CIA director David Petraeus in hunt for family wealth

      Matthew McCarthy was asked by KKR to fly to New York from Ohio, where he manages money for the founders of a consumer-products company. First he had dinner with KKR’s billionaire co-founder Henry Kravis. The next morning, he met David Petraeus, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and current chairman of the KKR Global Institute at the company’s headquarters.

    • Why would anyone want to buy shares in the Royal Bank of Scotland?

      Front and centre of these will be the settlement with US regulators for as much as $10bn (£6.5bn) for the mis-selling of sub-prime mortgages and mortgage securities, the scale of which could provide a serious headache for chief executive Ross McEwan.

    • Acting for Your Life on LA’s Skid Row

      The more he researched, the more he was drawn into the population that most middle-class people would prefer to ignore. After raising some modest funds, he opened an office to begin recruiting Skid Row’s residents for a theater that would tackle their problems and those of society as a whole. As you can imagine, given the psychological wreckage and drug problems of those who he would be directing, this was not an easy task. McEnteer writes about Jim Beame, a talented but mentally ill member of Malpede’s company who riffed about baseball and other things that struck his fancy in a performance piece and as such was described as the company’s “star” by People magazine:

      But there was no Hollywood happy ending for Jim Beame. True, his association with LAPD appeared to calm him down somewhat. He had become more subdued and less overtly angry. But still, in his anger he hallucinated whoever he was with into his parents or his ex-wife, who was trying to control him. He had been kicked out of virtually all the shelters on Skid Row for his loud, abusive behavior. He interrupted long recitations of baseball or basketball statistics only to make lewd comments to any women who happened to be present. Conversation with him was impossible. By the time he joined LAPD he had been on the streets for six years, living in a vacant lot near Chinatown, eating out of the trash.

    • 5 Facts About The Cuban Economy

      Cuba was doing business with the U.S. even before the embargo was lifted.

    • In Shocking Move, Goldman Slashes America’s Long-Run “Potential GDP” From 2.25% To 1.75%

      While Ben Bernanke will never agree that global economic growth has ground to a halt as a result of his monetary policies, a phenomenon which in the past year has been dubbed “secular stagnation” by the very serious weathermen (and will certainly never admit the reason for such stagnation), with every passing month one thing becomes clear: there can be no growth and certainly no prosperity for the broader population with a $200 trillion (and rising at over $10 trillion per year) overhang in global debt. And now, even Goldman gets it.

    • Proposals to extend marketplace subsidies would only delay damage

      Congressional proposals to temporarily extend federal health insurance subsidies if they’re lost in an upcoming Supreme Court decision would only delay, not avoid premium hikes, insurance market disruptions and potential coverage losses for millions of Americans.

    • Thousands of Ukrainians protest Kiev regime’s draconian utility price hikes

      Protests are mounting against decisions by the NATO-backed regime in Kiev to drastically increase prices for energy, water, and other basic necessities. Protesters reportedly set up a mock gallows near government buildings in downtown Kiev this weekend. The protests follow a march on May 16 of an estimated 5,000 people in Kiev to protest the price hikes.

      The right-wing government in Kiev is slashing spending on subsidies to basic goods to funnel the money to the Ukrainian regime’s Wall Street creditors and boosting military spending on the war against Russian-backed forces in east Ukraine. As a result, consumer prices for basic necessities are skyrocketing.

    • Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by $4.9 billion in government subsidies

      Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has built a multibillion-dollar fortune running companies that make electric cars, sell solar panels and launch rockets into space.

      [...]

      Tesla and SolarCity continue to report net losses after a decade in business, but the stocks of both companies have soared on their potential; Musk’s stake in the firms alone is worth about $10 billion. (SpaceX, a private company, does not publicly report financial performance.)

      Musk and his companies’ investors enjoy most of the financial upside of the government support, while taxpayers shoulder the cost.

  • Lobbying/Politics

    • Here’s what’s in Ben Bradlee’s FBI file

      Ben Bradlee was a legendary editor, a man whose Washington Post brought down a president and whose swashbuckling style made him a celebrity and a hero to many an aspiring journalist.

      But according to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s towering, autocratic leader for much of the postwar era, Bradlee was “a colossal liar” who was out to smear him.

    • Now open: The Clinton campaign store
    • Dredging Hanoi Lake for Life after McCain

      They have deranged smiles, hefty laughs, sometimes, like John McCain, seven homes, a cool twenty million in the bank, and that syphilitic grin.

      I was in Vietnam, 1994, talking with people in Hanoi. Saw the photos of children all lined up in the courtyard of an orphanage. Oh, maybe 20 in one shot, 10 in another, and the story was repeated through narratives, both visual and oral.

    • Dana Milbank: The clown car Republican field

      In the oversold Republican primary situation, a candidate is likeliest to get attention when there’s a screw-up, such as Jeb Bush’s five attempts last week to answer a simple question about Iraq, or the borderline racist questions posed to Cruz by Mark Halperin of Bloomberg News.

  • Censorship

    • Court Orders VPN, TOR & Proxy Advice Site to be Blocked

      The site, RUBlacklist, is an information resource aimed at users who wish to learn about tools that can be used to circumvent censorship. It doesn’t host any tools itself but offers advice on VPNs, proxies, TOR and The Pirate Bay’s Pirate Browser.

  • Privacy

    • WhatsApp and Google – Forced By MI5 to Hand Over Encrypted Messages

      New laws are about to take effect in the UK, where the Conservatives want to force Google, Apple and Facebook to hand over encrypted messages from suspects (criminals or terrorists) to unravel their plans and annihilate them. These encrypted messages might be analyzed by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

    • Inside the company that can predict the future by analyzing every piece of information on the web

      Even so, his company is likely to be clued in. That’s because Recorded Future doesn’t just mine open forums for information: it tries to scan every part of the open web. Hackers frequently talk to each other on chat platforms known as IRCs — and Recorded Future is able to pick up those conversations too.

    • PowerPoint should be banned. This PowerPoint presentation explains why.

      The indiscriminate and ingrained use of PowerPoint presentations threatens the military’s institutional integrity. Former defense secretary Robert Gates said he was terrified by the thought of promising young officers sitting in cubicles and reformatting slides in their prime working years. At the CIA, he was able to ban slides from briefings, but at the Pentagon, he couldn’t even cut down the number used. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter banned PowerPoint presentations during a summit in Kuwait to encourage analysis and discussions, instead of the usual fixed briefings.

    • Athenians, lobby your lawmakers to let PATRIOT Act expire
    • Patriot Act reform: Senate debates NSA surveillance – live updates

      Controversial provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire tonight if the Senate doesn’t reach a compromise on government surveillance in a rare Sunday session. We are inside Congress with all the latest updates on the fate of the first major reform package since the Edward Snowden revelations – and what another marathon legislative session could mean for the future of intelligence.

      The USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan compromise that would ban the bulk collection exposed by Snowden and is overwhelmingly backed in the House of Representatives, fell three votes short of advancing in another marathon nine days ago. A two-month extension of government surveillance proposed by supporters of the status quo also fell short of the 60-vote supermajority needed to start debate on a bill in the Senate.

    • Orange schools to monitor social media posts of students, staff

      What Orange County students — and staff — post on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is now being monitored by their school district to “ensure safe school operations,” the district announced this morning.

    • UK police requests to access phone calls or emails are granted 93% of the time

      Ministers are facing calls to curb the scale of police access to private phone and email records, after a report by privacy campaigners found officers were making a request every two minutes and getting access in 93% of cases.

      The figures, released to Big Brother Watch under freedom of information laws, found there were more than 730,000 requests for communications data between 2012 and 2014 from forces across the UK. There were annual increases in applications in each of those years, peaking at just under 250,000 last year, according to the report.

  • Civil Rights

    • Theater of the Absurd

      Elected in the brand name of peace, the Barack Obama has joked to his White House staff that he is “good at killing people.”

    • North Korea, Somalia top most corrupt countries’ list
    • Jeffrey Sterling vs. the CIA: the Untold Story
    • Persecution of CIA’s Jeffrey Sterling

      The U.S. government’s successful prosecution of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for leaking secrets about a failed covert operation to the press followed a long campaign against him for protesting racial discrimination inside the spy agency, writes Norman Solomon.

    • Jeffrey Sterling vs. the CIA: An Untold Story of Race and Retribution
    • Jeffrey Sterling vs. the CIA: An Untold Story of Race and Retribution
    • LATEST VICTIM IN U.S. WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS

      Jeffrey Sterling recently stood before a judge as his sentence was read. The former CIA officer, the judge declared, would spend 42 months — that’s three and half years — behind bars.

      The feds had convicted Sterling on nine felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.

      He didn’t sell secrets to the Russians. He didn’t trade intelligence for personal gain. He made no attempt to disrupt the American way of life.

      What did he do, then?

    • CIA Whistleblower Kiriakou Joins Anti-War Activists To Write Letters To Political Prisoners

      He spent 30 months in federal prison for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s government-sanctioned torture practices. Now John Kiriakou joins activists from the anti-war group Code Pink to write letters to other activists, dissenters and perceived political prisoners.

    • AUDIO: Whistleblower John Kiriakou to Robert Scheer: Whistleblowers ‘Are Not Alone’
    • Truthdigger of the Week: Whistleblower John Kiriakou

      As Kiriakou told Scheer, the DOJ stacks the cards in its favor by filing as many charges as it can against a defendant, burying the victim in legal fees and, even more important, in fear. And win it does. According to a ProPublica piece that Kiriakou references in the Truthdig interview, the Department of Justice is victorious in 98.2 percent of its cases.

    • Why the last of the JFK files could embarrass the CIA

      Shortly after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who oversaw the first official inquiry, was asked by a reporter if the full record would be made public.

    • Top-Secret JFK Files Coming Soon—Maybe

      The 1992 JFK Records Act established that 40,000 documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy would be made public in October 2017. Now that the date is little more than two years away, seven archivists and technicians with top-secret security clearances have begun poring over the pages for processing at the National Archives, Politico reports. “Within our power, the National Archives is going to do everything we can to make these records open and available to the public,” Martha Murphy, head of the archives’ Special Access branch, says. “That is my only goal.” However, the president-to-be will have the power to keep the records—including 3,600 documents that have never been made public—under lock and key, a move many fear will fuel lingering doubts about whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, whether US officials knew about the plot in advance, and if officials purposefully blocked a full investigation.

    • 3,600 unseen documents on JFK assassination to be released, website reports

      Was the assassination of John F. Kennedy engineered by a government agency? Did Lee Harvey Oswald work for the mob, or for communists? And just why was he in New Orleans in the summer before the assassination?

    • Remaining JFK Records Could Prove Controversial to Nation’s Spy Agencies

      The remaining records concerning the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy are to be made public by October 2017, by law, but the release of those records is not guaranteed and may not happen if agencies such as the CIA and FBI appeal to the then-sitting president.

      “We have sent letters to agencies letting them know we have records here that were withheld,” Martha Murphy, head of the National Archives’ Special Access Branch, told Politico. While no agencies have requested a waiver quite yet, some have “gotten back to ask for clarification” while seeking more information.

    • The Kennedy files

      The JFK Records Act of 1992 ordered that all of the files related to the federal inquiry into John F. Kenney’s assassination be made public in 25 years. As the October 2017 deadline nears, POLITICO takes a look at what the files might tell us – if we actually get to see them.

    • Sen. Richard Burr: The Cloak and Dagger Senator

      No sooner had he become committee chairman this year when he staged an unheard of stunt in trying to reclaim from the executive branch copies of a classified report — revealing new evidence of torture via “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Central Intelligence Agency — in order to bury it. It had been issued by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and the committee only weeks earlier.

    • Church Committee’s Fading Legacy

      In September 1975, CIA Director William E. Colby told Sen. Frank Church’s committee that 37 lethal poisons were discovered in an agency lab. Church, left, with Co-Chairman John G. Tower, R-Texas, displayed a poison dart gun for all to see.

      [...]

      Schwarz, Fenn, Weiner and Wyden all agree that in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, many of the institutions spawned by the Church Committee’s investigations were seriously weakened.

      One blow to the power of the FISA court, Weiner said, came when President George W. Bush authorized warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens without going to the court. It was an effective end-run, he said.

      “The system broke down after 9/11 on the direct orders of the president of the United States, who tried to bypass and countermand the court,” Weiner said.

      Fenn recalled a CIA official’s telling remark during a hearing.

    • Journalist’s Spying Trial Starts In Iran

      Washington Post’s Tehran reporter Jason Rezaian is accused of espionage and gathering classified information, among other charges.

    • Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian goes on trial in Iran for spying

      Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter imprisoned in Iran for nearly 10 months, is standing trial behind closed doors in Tehran on charges of espionage and at least three other major crimes.

    • Can you tell the difference between Bush and Obama on the Patriot Act?

      Dick Cheney and George W Bush were widely condemned by Democrats for their baseless fear-mongering to pressure members of Congress into passing expansive surveillance laws that infringed on American’s civil liberties. Unfortunately, with parts of their Patriot Act set to expire on Monday, the Obama administration is playing the very same game that its own party once decried hyperbolic and dishonest – even after a Justice Department report released last week concluded that the expiring section used to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk has never been vital to national security.

      See if you can tell the difference between the Obama administration’s statements about the renewal of the Patriot Act and those from the Bush administration when they wanted Congress to renew some of the controversial mass surveillance authorities they passed after 9/11.

    • Jailed Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez goes on hunger strike

      The jailed leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Leopoldo Lopez, has declared he is on a hunger strike and called for a protest march next weekend against the socialist government.

      Lopez, the best-known opposition activist in custody, was jailed more than a year ago for his role in instigating street protests against the president, Nicolás Maduro, that led to violence in which 43 people died and hundreds more were injured.

    • Facts About the Media Garbage Against Diosdado Cabello

      The CIA has been linked to each and every one of the conspiratorial and coup-making processes against the Bolivarian Revolution, call them coups, economic war, assassination attempts against the president, or barricades (guarimbas). (The CIA is) another sewer pipe that logically excretes pestilent water against the Revolution that it has been unable to overthrow. The CIA being used as a “journalistic sewer pipe” demonstrates what their intentions are.

    • Operation Condor: Cross-Border Disappearance and Death

      Operation Condor was a covert, multinational “black operations” program organized by six Latin American states (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, later joined by Ecuador and Peru), with logistical, financial, and intelligence support from Washington.

    • An ex-spy whose cover is author

      Escaping surveillance is what Matthews used to do for a living. Officially he was a diplomat, in Europe, Asia and the Caribbean, but his real job was recruiting and then managing foreign agents, often in places where such activity was forbidden.

    • The dirty truth about voting & How to be a billionaire by 40

      An extensive Princeton University study shows that the American people have no impact on which laws get passed.

    • Beauty queen fights racial bias in Japan

      Can a beauty pageant combat racial bias in one of the most homogeneous societies on Earth?

      Ariana Miyamoto, who is part African-American, thinks it can. And she has been enduring a lot of abuse to make that point.

    • Colossal Injustice Of Torture Victim Abu Zubaydah’s Ongoing Imprisonment

      It’s been some time since I wrote about Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn), one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantánamo in September 2006, beyond discussions of his important case against the Polish government, where he was held in a secret CIA torture prison in 2002 and 2003. This led to a ruling in his favor in the European Court of Human Rights last July, and a decision in February this year to award him — and another Guantánamo prisoner and torture victim, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — $262,000 in damages, for which, just last week, a deadline for payment was set for May 16, even though, as the Guardian noted, “neither Polish officials nor the US embassy in Warsaw would say where the money is going or how it was being used.”

    • “Incommunicado” Forever: Gitmo Detainee’s Case Stalled for 2,477 Days and Counting

      Since being seized in a raid in Pakistan in 2002, Abu Zubaydah has had his life controlled by American officials, first at secret sites, where he was tortured, and since 2006 in a small cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And, thanks to one of the strangest, and perhaps most troubling, legal cases to grow out of the War on Terror, it appears he’s not going to be leaving anytime soon—which was exactly the plan the CIA always wanted. Not even his lawyers understand what’s transpired behind closed doors in a Washington, D.C., courtroom.

    • Enemies of the State: Beijing Targets NGOs

      Fear of foreign infiltration behind a draft law that turns civic groups into security risks

    • Report alleges border patrol engaged in abusive behavior

      An American Civil Liberties Union report alleges that border patrol agents have engaged in racial profiling and intimidation tactics along southern New Mexico’s border with Mexico.

    • Confirm EU blacklist demands MP

      The EU has imposed sanctions and some travel bans on Russia for its actions in Ukraine.

    • The Cost of Secrecy

      Early last year, Pakistani anti-drone activist Kareem Khan received an unannounced visit at his Rawalpindi home from over a dozen unidentified men, some in police uniforms. He was subsequently abducted without being offered any explanation and, over the course of the next nine days, interrogated about his anti-drone work and tortured. After a local court ordered Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to produce Khan he was released and told not to speak to the media.

      Khan was due to travel to Europe to testify before parliamentarians about a December 2009 U.S. drone strike on his North Waziristan home that killed his brother and son along with a local stonemason staying with his family. He had also filed a case against the Pakistani government for its failure to investigate the deaths of his family members.

    • Why is this war hero being investigated?

      Lt. Col. Jason Amerine, a Special Forces war hero who played an instrumental role in the overthrow of the Taliban in the months after 9/11, is under investigation over a purported unauthorized disclosure relating to a U.S. hostage held overseas that was made to U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter’s office.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Cloudflare: We’re Not Aiding and Abetting Piracy

        Popular CDN service CloudFlare has denied allegations from the RIAA that accuse the company of aiding and abetting piracy. Warning against a SOPA-like precedent, the company has asked the court not to include CloudFlare in the restraining order which aims to stop a reincarnation of music service Grooveshark.

      • Steve Albini: The music industry is a parasite… and copyright is dead

        Steve Albini is a renowned musician, record engineer, producer and songwriter. He’s also not shy of expressing a controversial opinion or two.

      • European Court To Explore If Linking To Infringing Material Is Infringing

        A couple of years ago in the Svensson case, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) made it clear (finally) that merely linking to content is not infringement. That was a case involving a news aggregator linking to official sources. However, in a new case that has been referred to the CJEU, the court will examine if links to unauthorized versions of content is infringing as well. The excellent IPKat has the details of the case which involves a blog that linked to some pre-publication Playboy photos in the Netherlands. A lower court had said that it wasn’t copyright infringement, but still broke the law, by facilitating access.

05.30.15

Links 30/5/2015: Wine 1.7.44, Berry Linux 1.20

Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Save server admin time and money with these two open source solutions

    Fortunately, an open-source solution exists that does not require a monthly fee. That solution is Webmin, which, like competing closed-source products, allows users to configure and control various applications, such as the Apache HTTP Server, PHP, MySQL, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and others, without needing to use command-line configuration of these disparate products.

  • GNU guru slams Windows, OS X, popular apps as malware

    Microsoft Windows and Apple’s operating systems are malware because they “snoop and shackle” users, GNU creator Richard Stallman said in an opinion piece published in The Guardian.

  • 2 Geeks Invent Technology that Thwarts the NSA

    COMMUNITY CUBE is an open source initiative dedicated to protecting the privacy and security of online citizens around the world. We design, build and distribute technological solutions that protect email, web browsing, data storage and social media activity in a safe, affordable and easy to use manner.

  • Richard Stallman and Phil Zimmerman underline key concerns with tech sector

    Two of technology’s most pioneering developers have strongly criticised the current state of the industry, warning that the right to encryption is doomed and that users are exploited by the software that they use.
    Open sourcerer Richard Stallman has painted a very bleak picture of today’s technology and communications environment, describing proprietary software as “malware”.

    Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, perhaps not surprisingly has a very jaundiced view of proprietary software, and of Microsoft Windows especially.

  • A fight is brewing over ads in the ‘open-source Photoshop’

    It’s an accusation that SourceForge quickly refuted, with its public response titled “GIMP-Win project wasn’t hijacked, just abandoned.” As far as it’s concerned, the project was dumped more than 18 months ago, and SourceForge charitably “stepped-in to keep this project current.” The rebuttal also claims that previous concerns over misleading third-party ads were discussed and addressed well before this controversy began.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Considering Hadoop? Evaluate Apache Drill Along With It

      MapR Technologies, which focuses on Apache Hadoop, recently announced the general availability of Apache Drill 1.0 in the MapR Distribution. Drill, which we’ve covered before, delivers self-service SQL analytics without requiring pre-defined schema definitions, dramatically reducing the time required for business analysts to explore and understand data.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Libre Office comes to Android

      The Document Foundation has released a version of Libre Office for Android.

      The new app allows users to read and edit documents. The Document Foundation bills the app as a “Viewer” with “experimental … basic editing capabilities, like modifying words in existing paragraphs and changing font styles such as bold and italic.”

      Viewing documents will also feel like an experiment for many users: when Vulture South tried the app it dumped us into a listing of our Galaxy S5′s directories and offered no depiction of the phone’s internal storage or secondary SD card. Nor does the app integrate with the cloud storage services to which we subscribe.

  • CMS

    • Dynamically static

      Since 26th December 2005, I’ve been runnning this blog with WordPress. At the time there were little alternatives and finally I had got hold of a host (Dreamhost, at the time) that supported PHP and MySQL without being overly restrictive. 10 years later, things have somehow changed.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU FISICALAB 0.3.5

      I’m glad to announce the release of version 0.3.5 of GNU FisicaLab, this is a feature release. FisicaLab (can be pronounced as PhysicsLab) is an educational application to solve physics problems. Its main objective is let the user to focus in physics concepts, leaving aside the mathematical details

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Why aren’t you using github?
    • Announcing GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub

      I’ve been working on building a decentralized GitHub, and I’d like to talk about what this means and why it matters — and more importantly, show you how it can be done and real GitTorrent code I’ve implemented so far.

    • PHP version 5.5.26RC1 and 5.6.10RC1

      Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are only available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests.

Leftovers

  • ‘Farewell, readers’: Alan Rusbridger on leaving the Guardian after two decades at the helm

    This, if you’re reading the physical paper – which, of course, you are not – is my last edition as editor. In just over 20 years we have put nearly 7,500 papers “to bed”, as almost no one says nowadays. At some point in the 24-hour, seamlessly rolling digital news cycle, you’ll have a new editor. I will have slipped away and my successor, Katharine Viner, will have materialised at the helm.

  • Bangert: Awkward … Ed reform called out at Purdue

    Maryann Santos de Barona, dean of Purdue University’s College of Education for the past six years, was at the front of a Stewart Center meeting room May 14 for one of those death-by-PowerPoint presentations. From among her dozens of slides, the dean was showing the university’s trustees a sinking trend line of undergraduates enrolled in Purdue’s teacher education program.

  • Pakistani CEO arrested for selling degrees from “Barkley” and “Columbiana”

    The CEO of a Pakistani company called Axact, which called itself the country’s largest software exporter, was arrested yesterday in Karachi. Axact and its CEO, Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh, are accused of running a global network of selling fake diplomas.

  • Stuxnet

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why did the US Army ship live anthrax?

      US military officials revealed Wednesday that the Army bioweapons laboratory at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah shipped live anthrax samples to 18 facilities in nine US states, as well as to a US military base in South Korea.

    • China doesn’t recognize ‘illegal’ McMahon Line: Beijing responds to NSA Ajit Doval

      Sticking to its stand that McMahon Line on India-China boundary is “illegal”, China said on Monday it is ready to work with India to resolve the vexed border issue at an early date through “friendly consultations” to create more favourable conditions for bilateral ties.

    • Assange: UK Media Silent on Trident Leaks Due to Self-Censorship
    • ​Trident nuke safety questioned by Salmond after Navy whistleblower leak

      Alex Salmond has secured time in Parliament on Thursday afternoon to debate claims by a Navy whistleblower that Britain’s Trident nuclear missiles are unsafe and unsecure.

      The MP for Gordon and former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader will question the government on safety at HM Naval Base Clyde, where Trident submarines are based.

      Whistleblower William McNeilly, 25, is currently being held in a secure military base in Scotland. He went AWOL following the publication of his damning report into safety and security at the site.

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has accused the “conspicuously silent” British media of self-censorship over its coverage of the Trident revelations.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Even Before TPP And TTIP, US Already Being Forced To Change Laws By Trade Agreements

      As that makes clear, alongside the fact that it is quite possible that the US will indeed modify its laws here because of a trade agreement, this would be happening even though the laws in question enjoy huge support among the US public. Which shows that trade agreements can not only force laws to be changed, but can do so with absolutely no regard to what the people in whose name they are supposedly negotiated, actually want.

    • How to Prevent the Next Global Recession
    • We Need New Budget Agreement to Reverse Mindless Austerity

      Cuts to affordable housing deny resources to transform clusters of poverty into functioning and sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods and eliminate lead poisoning in communities such as Baltimore, where this preventable and prevalent illness is a contributing factor in the cycle of poverty.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Charter Industry Strong-Arms Public Officials; $3.3 Billion Spent (Part 5)

      The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has pledged to tighten controls of its quarter-billion-dollar-a-year charter schools program—a program repeatedly criticized by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for waste and inadequate financial controls, as CMD has helped document in this special report series.

    • The Press And Bernie Sanders

      As the Vermont liberal spreads his income equality campaign message, the press corps seems unsure of how to cover him. In the month since he announced his bid, Sanders’ coverage seems to pale in comparison to comparable Republican candidates who face an arduous task of obtaining their party’s nomination. The reluctance is ironic, since the D.C. press corps for months brayed loudly about how Hillary Clinton must face a primary challenger. Now she has one and the press can barely feign interest?

    • Why The Media Ignores Jeremy Hammond While Praising Edward Snowden

      Jeremy Hammond’s hack of Stratfor, a corporate intelligence agency, created global solidarity by revealing how the 1% targets activists worldwide.

  • Censorship

    • Did the New Statesman censor its censorship issue?

      Now, Spiegelman has accused the magazine of censoring him. In a post on his Facebook page, Spiegelman says that he pulled the special cover he had drawn for the magazine at the last minute after the magazine went back on an agreement to include his ‘First Amendment Fundamentalist’ full-page cartoon. The cartoon in question referenced the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

    • A summer break from campus muzzling

      The attack on free expression is sinister because it asserts that such freedom is not merely unwise but, in a sense, meaningless. Free speech is more comprehensively and aggressively embattled now than ever before in American history, largely because of two 19th-century ideas. One is that history — actually, History, a proper noun — has a mind of its own. The other is that most people do not really have minds of their own.

    • 6 June: Artistic censorship in repressive regime

      The panel will be asked to explore from their personal and political perspective different aspects of freedom of expression in repressive regimes; the interface between artistic inspiration and life in repressive regimes, and the role of the media in terms of raising awareness of the increasing restrictions placed on artists to curb freedom of expression.

    • Anti-Censorship Coalition Backs Steinbeck’s Book
    • Censorship of breasts is misogynistic

      Sexualization of the female body is a man-made concept, a notion that dates far prior to the tantalizing brushstrokes of Picasso’s daring hand. Society’s ingrains the impression that the female body is somehow erotic and must be suppressed in order to prevent adultery and fornication. Instead of placing responsibility on the patrilineal figures, the blame is continually set on women.

    • Nipple censorship: Why are we so afraid of the human body?

      I have nipples.

      As does everyone. So why are we obsessed with hiding them?

      Instagram clarified its nipple rule last week: They are a no-no, but breastfeeding is OK, as are mastectomy scars. Facebook is also anti-nip.

    • Should Authors Shun or Cooperate With Chinese Censors?

      A report by the PEN American Center, which found some books were expurgated by Chinese censors without the authors even knowing it, called on those who want their works published in the lucrative Chinese market to be vigilant, and recommended a set of principles in dealing with publishers.

    • ‘The UK is becoming the world leader in censorship’, says obscenity lawyer following porn ID checks proposal

      Britain is at the cutting-edge of censorship, it has been claimed, as government plans to implement ID-based age checks for pornography websites gather pace.

    • UK pornography industry proposes user ID checks for adult websites

      Britons may soon face identity checks to access adult material on the internet, according to discussions between Whitehall and the private sector.

      A scheme proposed by the pornography industry would see adult sites verifying visitors’ identity with organisations such as banks, credit reference agencies or even the NHS.

    • Free porn sites in the UK could be subject to age checks
    • UK porn laws might mean ID checks with the post office
    • Will User ID Verification Proposed By UK Pornography Industry Come To The US?
    • The onslaught of Internet porn
    • Government plans pose serious risk to free expression

      The new UK government’s plans to tackle extremism and introduce a British bill of rights, as outlined in the Queen’s Speech on 27 May, raise the stakes significantly for freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.

    • Scholar takes a dim view of haredi censors

      Last week, after Israel’s new cabinet ministers posed for a photographer, the picture appeared in a popular news site and a newspaper serving the country’s haredi, or fervently Orthodox, community. There was, however, a notable alteration: The faces of the three women cabinet ministers were blurred out, apparently for the sake of “modesty.”

    • Film censorship in China

      A group of Chinese filmmakers, scholars and curators discuss independent filmmaking in China and the government’s crackdown on independent film festivals in recent years

    • Muhammad Cartoon Ad Blocked From D.C. Buses and Train Stations

      The mass transit authority that oversees commuter buses and trains in the nation’s capital is banning issue-oriented ads for the remainder of the year after receiving an ad proposal featuring a cartoon of Muhammad, Islam’s central figure.

      The cartoon is a sketch by artist Bosch Fawstin of a turban-wearing, sword-wielding man saying “You can’t draw me!” It won a “draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas, that was unsuccessfully attacked by Muslim-American roommates earlier this month.

      The ads would have sported a banner saying “Support Free Speech.”

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • U.S. removes Cuba from list of terrorism sponsors
    • “Pretrial Punishment”: Julian Assange Remains in Ecuadorean Embassy Fearing Arrest If He Leaves

      Five years ago this week, U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was arrested in Kuwait and charged with leaking classified information. Weeks later, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of internal logs from the war in Afghanistan. It was one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. Major articles ran in The New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel and other outlets. Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley, and Julian Assange soon became household names. While Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail, Assange has been living for the past three years inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has political asylum. Assange faces investigations in both Sweden and the United States. Here in the United States, a secret grand jury is investigating WikiLeaks for its role in publishing leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs and State Department cables. In Sweden, Assange is wanted for questioning on allegations of sexual misconduct, though no charges have been filed. “Look at Thomas Drake, for example, NSA whistleblower … The pretrial process was both the deterrent, the general deterrent, and it was the penalty,” Assange said. “And the same thing is happening here in the WikiLeaks process, where we have no rights as a defendant because the formal trial hasn’t started yet. The same thing has happened with me here in this embassy in relation to the Swedish case: no charges, no trial, no ability to defend yourself, don’t even have a right to documents, because you’re not even a defendant.”

    • Julian Assange on NSA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Secretive Deal, and Europe’s Secret Plan for Military Force on Refugee Boats from Libya.
    • VIDEO: Julian Assange on NSA, TPP, British Nukes, Libyan Refugees and His Struggle for Freedom

      In an hourlong discussion on “Democracy Now!” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that the NSA can continue to spy on Americans in spite of legislation coming out of Congress and that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is about corporate control.

    • Real Democracy Promotion: Lord Acton and Tom Clancy vs John Yoo

      This currently anti-democratic system can likely be traced to a couple of weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when a top secret memo was written by Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Attorney John Yoo, (who would also write the “torture memo” a year later). The OLC memo stated, among other things: “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. ‘When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.’” This OLC opinion–see full article by retired Army Major Todd Pierce–claimed authority of the President as the Commander in Chief to use the military both inside and outside of the U.S., and was probably the authority for the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) military operation within the U.S., spying on Americans.

    • Dallas PD Guts Specifics From Citizen Recording Policy, Leaving Only Vague Reminder To Respect Pre-Existing Rights

      It shouldn’t need to come to this, but the Dallas Police Department has finally issued a policy related to citizen photography. There are many reasons law enforcement agencies need to remind officers of the right to record, but the Dallas PD may have needed a bit more of a nudge after a Texas legislator tried (unsuccessfully) to impose additional restrictions on citizen recordings — like a 25-foot “halo” around working officers, supposedly for their safety.

    • New Dallas Police Photo Rights Policy Way Too Vague, Photographers Say

      The Dallas Police Department has officially released a new general order that’s meant to inform officers on photographers’ rights. The document, titled “Public Recording of Official Acts,” warns officers that they cannot interfere with a person photographing or filming their activities as long as the recording is being done in an appropriate way.

    • Man Threatens Suicide, Police Kill Him

      On May 11, Justin Way was drinking and threatening to hurt himself. His father, George Way, said his son was a recovering alcoholic and had been alcohol-free for five weeks.

      “He just lost his job, and he had a setback,” he said.

      Way’s live-in girlfriend, Kaitlyn Christine Lyons, said she’d caught Justin drinking a bottle of vodka, which she took away from him to pour out. She said he was drunk, lying in their bed with a large knife, saying he would hurt himself with it. She called a non-emergency number in an attempt to get her boyfriend to a local St. Augustine, Florida, hospital for help—and told them she did not feel threatened.

      “My brother has been Baker Acted three times because he was threatening to hurt himself so I figured that would happen with Justin,” said Lyons. Florida’s Baker Act allows the involuntary institutionalization of an individual, and it can be initiated by law enforcement officials.

      “The only person Justin threatened was himself and I honestly don’t think he wanted to die.”

      Minutes later, two St. Johns County Sheriff’s deputies, 26-year-old Jonas Carballosa and 32-year-old Kyle Braig, arrived at the home, armed with assault rifles, and told Kaitlyn to wait outside.

      “I thought they were going into war,” she remembered thinking when she first saw the large guns. Within moments, Justin was shot dead.

    • Sunk: How Ross Ulbricht ended up in prison for life

      On October 1, 2013, the last day that Ross Ulbricht would be free, he didn’t leave his San Francisco home until nearly 3:00pm. When he did finally step outside, he walked ten minutes to the Bello Cafe on Monterey Avenue but found it full, so he went next door to the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library. There, he sat down at a table by a well-lit window in the library’s small science fiction section and opened his laptop.

      From his spot in the library, Ulbricht, a 29-year-old who lived modestly in a rented room, settled in to his work. Though outwardly indistinguishable from the many other techies and coders working in San Francisco, Ulbricht actually worked the most unusual tech job in the city—he ran the Silk Road, the Internet’s largest drug-dealing website.

    • Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Sentenced To Life In Prison

      Ross Ulbricht, the man behind the darkweb drug marketplace known as the Silk Road, has just been sentenced to more imprisonment than he has actual lives: two life sentences and “max sentences on all other charges.” In addition, the government has chosen to hold him financially culpable for every single transaction that occurred at the Silk Road — a fine of $184 million — $166 million of which it has already recouped through the auction of seized Bitcoins.

    • Former House speaker Dennis Hastert indicted by federal grand jury

      J. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker in the history of the U.S. House, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges that he violated banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million to an unnamed person to cover up “past misconduct.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • After FBI domain expires, seized Megaupload.com serves up porn

        Earlier this week, something suspicious started happening with Web addresses related to sites seized by the FBI from Megaupload and a number of online gambling sites. Instead of directing browsers to a page with an FBI banner, they started dropping Web surfers onto a malicious feed of Web advertisements—some of them laden with malware.

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