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05.28.14

Microsoft’s Openwashing Propaganda Effective in Blocking Government Use of Free/Open Source Software

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 8:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Wiper

Summary: Microsoft is trying to wipe FOSS off the agenda of the United Kingdom by essentially labeling its proprietary software “open” and claiming it to be cheaper (perhaps using bribes/predatory discounts)

AS ONE who works with the public sector in the UK, I know a lot of managers who grasp the value of Free/libre software and proudly speak about it. Only a minority seems to be dogmatic about proprietary software. The British corporate press, however, is more interested in talking to Microsoft minions and partners. Perhaps that’s where the money is (for the press). Selective quoting and selective approaches sure serve the agenda. Based on many years of reading the British press (especially on the subject of FOSS), I hold a strong conviction and certainty that the press is very much complicit in Microsoft propaganda whose purpose is to push back against ODF and Free software.

Recently we saw lots of the British media quoting only a man or two men (in suits, e.g. a local CIO), extrapolating/generalising their words to come up with sensationalist pro-Microsoft headlines, alleging quite weirdly that Microsoft is cheaper than Free software. Well, Microsoft sure seems to have infiltrated Newham, as we showed repeatedly for many years when Mr. Steele was the CIO there. Now we’re dealing not with a Microsoft MOU but with suits who claim Microsoft to be “open” (shared), spreading TCO FUD as well (see [1] at the bottom for a little portion of the propaganda). This is a disgrace.

In the previous post we showed Microsoft's latest attempt to derail GNU/Linux in the Middle Kingdom by openwashing Windows (there has been a lot of Microsoft-coordinated openwashing this year [1, 2, 3, 4] and there are many older examples [1, 2]). We are saddened to see that this trend is growing as the Microsoft booster Darryl K. Taft is back to eWeek for some of the Mirosoft propaganda of “cross-platform” .NET. Now, here is a pattern to watch out for: what does the current CIO of Newham say about Microsoft? According to the article, “Microsoft’s Shared Source Initiative, which sees qualified customers licensed with product source for debugging and reference purposes, is one example of this says Connell.”

This is utter nonsense. It’s marketing and hogwash. Everyone in the FOSS world knows this. Then it continues: “Regardless of the provenance of any underlying code in a service, cost will always be the key factor in sourcing it, he claims.”

So now we are told that not only is Microsoft “cheaper” but also “open”. Yes, it’s only make believe. Read this article from one year ago. Connell is contradicting even himself. To quote: “Local authorities are faced with a choice of either forking out for costly software licence upgrades or keeping staff, Geoff Connell, CIO at Newham Borough Council, has told Computer Weekly.”

To quote the company that brought this contradiction to our attention: “Didn’t Geoff Connell said the opposite last year? … Is Stockholm syndrome slowing #opensource adoption?”

Watch what he says a year later. To quote: “London authorities are working together to look at how they can procure best. “We’ve got support from the Government Procurement Service to help us buy collectively and improve the deal that way,” said Connell.

““However, with the likes of Oracle and Microsoft the prices are set, so they are not so open to discussion,” he added.”

And yes, Connell advocates paying Microsoft for spyware with back doors. In the public sector! This is beyond dangerous, it’s vandalism.

“*If* this is true,” writes Mark Taylor, “Newham’s ‘Proprietary cheaper than Open Source’ claim looks a little shaky… what are the facts?”

Ask Microsoft. It ran a “Get the Facts” campaign, with figures paid for by Microsoft.

Taylor also asks: “what kind of special deal would make this true?”

We already know that Microsoft is trying to kill the threat of FOSS selectively, e.g. with bribes (or special discounts) in places such as Munich. This is monopoly abuse and Newham is now part of the problem, helped by the British (corporate) press. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Use of money saving open source software skyrockets

    One London CIO has claimed to the UK press that in cases where the public sector can no longer provide competitive cost savings with proprietary systems, it may choose to adopt open source alternatives.

    According to Geoff Connell, Havering and Newham joint head of ICT, despite the government’s open source drive, even after all this time open source tends to only be used for niche solutions.

    TCO (total cost of ownership) is the biggest problem in adopting open source technology and software in the public sector, Connell contends.

Bill Gates’ Plot to Enslave China With ‘Free’ Back Doors is Failing, But Microsoft Strikes Back With Openwashing

Posted in Asia, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 8:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

–Bill Gates about the Chinese (1998)

National Security Agency

Summary: Microsoft is trying to portray itself and Windows as “open” because China is dumping the NSA Trojan horse that Bill Gates put there a couple of decades ago

BILL GATES is quite openly an NSA proponent and one thing that Gates and the NSA have in common is that they both use the Chinese as whipping boys. Gates likes to urge Chinese billionaires to give away (despite the fact that he himself is hoarding, not giving away) and the NSA pressures China to not do what the US has been doing for decades. Remember that Windows is an NSA Trojan horse, based on Edward Snowden’s invaluable leaks.

Bill Gates’ Microsoft has collaborated with the NSA like no other technology company (Microsoft is the #1 company in PRISM) and we recently wrote about China's ban on the latest Windows. This is a massive turning point — one that even Gates lobbying trips to China might not be able to tackle.

Glyn Moody, writing about China’s relationship with Linux, has just made some important points alluding to China’s relation to Android, some forks of mobile operating systems (e.g. COS), and various GNU/Linux distributions, managed and developed by the world’s largest population. Here is his opening paragraph (the article as a whole is worth a read):

The history of Linux in China is chequered. Android is doing extremely well there, even if it tends to be varieties that are more or less independent from Google (no bad thing.) But on the desktop, GNU/Linux has had a pretty disastrous showing. That’s strange, because you would think that the Chinese authorities would jump at the chance to adopt a free operating system that was independent of the US, and which could be inspected for NSA backdoors even before the current Snowden leaks showed why that would be a good idea.

Moody quotes Gates on China, hopefully reminding the Chinese how Gates is really viewing them. He uses an old trick for disguising colonialism/imperialism as “charity” — a trick that the CIA, USAID and various other covert operations have used for decades. Gates does this not only in China but especially in Africa and there are new articles about it [1] in the mass media [2] (finally it’s acceptable to say the truth about Gates in some circles of corporate press). Don’t forget how Bill Gates advances GMO in Africa through proxies like AGRA (new article about it in [3]) and has lobbied for it in India, apparently with success (new depressing article confirms some successes [4]). In the US, Gates is now seeking to monopolise and profit from schools, prisons, and police (people are complaining these days [5,6]). The ‘gift’ of private US monopolies is all that Gates seems to be offering, especially because he is a principal shareholder of these monopolies. Some call it profiteering. It’s all just a ploy.

Speaking of ploys, watch the Microsoft-funded IDG pushing some Microsoft propaganda in China. Someone called Sheila Lam is apparently trying to respond to China’s escape from Windows by openwashing Windows. She writes that “Microsoft is embracing open source in China.”

Utter nonsense. Marketing disguised as journalism.

Lam is referring to the malicious proxy known as "Microsoft Open Technologies" (we also wrote about it in [1, 2]). “Earlier this year,” writes Lam, “the software giant launched China Microsoft Open Technologies Shanghai to extend its existing open source development to the Middle Kingdom.”

This is nonsense marketing and everyone in the Free/Open Source world knows that “Microsoft Open Technologies” exists to whitewash and openwash proprietary software from Microsoft. But don’t let facts get in the way of so-called ‘journalists’ with agenda and bosses who receive payments from Microsoft.

“In 2012,” adds Lam, “Microsoft set up a subsidiary–Microsoft Open Technologies–to help bridge the gap between Redmond’s proprietary products and non-Microsoft technologies.”

Notice that term “non-Microsoft technologies”; it’s almost offensive. This is how Microsoft views competition. Microsoft uses the same tactics in the British government right now, as we shall show in the next post. Microsoft just keeps pretending to be the opposite of what it is in order to fit procurement criteria, not only in the UK but also in China. █

“Gates has created a huge blood-buying operation that only cares about money, not about people.”

–AIDS organisation manager, December 2009 (New York Times)

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Why Bill Gates gets it wrong

    Worse, Munk’s observations frequently seem to have been, at the very least, greatly exaggerated for narrative effect. Does Bill Gates really believe that I advocated specific crops without worrying about whether there was a market for them, or that I failed to consider national taxation in my ongoing advice to government leaders? Moreover, the agricultural strategies and choices in the MVP have been led by African agronomists, some of the very best in Africa — often working hand in hand with Bill’s own agricultural staff in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

  2. Bill Gates is wrong on Africa

    These are just two of many current examples. Despite Gates being factually wrong, the worst part is that his message steers people and policy makers away from the most critical problem facing Africa: corruption. Not speaking up where such abuses occur and propagating a false message in his letter is dishonest.

  3. GMO Crops and Labeling: Barack Obama and the Monsanto Betrayal

    Nor is it coincidental that two of the Obama’s biggest supporters, Bill Gates and George Soros, purchased 900,000 and 500,000 shares of Monsanto, respectively, in 2010.

  4. Punjab shortlists Monsanto, two others to provide subsidised HYV maize seeds

    The Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Monday approved a proposal of the State agriculture department, which shortlisted Monsanto and two other companies to provide high yielding varieties (HYV) of maize seeds to farmers at subsidised rates during the current Kharif season.

  5. It’s Time for Bill Gates to Throw in the Education Towel

    Anthony Cody points out that for the past dozen years or so, Bill Gates has had his fun experimenting with education reform. Obsessed as he is with measurement and data, he imagined that he could impose his narrow ideas on American public schools and bring about a magical transformation.

    Does American education need reform and improvement? Absolutely. Stuck as it is in the paradigm of testing and punishment, it sorely needs a revival of humanism and attention to the needs of children, families, and communities. It needs teachers who are well-prepared. It needs a recommitment o the health and happiness of children and to a deeper love of learning.

    Yet Gates used HS vast wealth to steer national policy to the dry and loveless task of higher scores on tests of dubious value.

    He wanted charter schools, and Arne Duncan, his faithful liege, demanded more charter schools,even if it was central to the Republican agenda.

    He wanted national standards and quite willingly paid out over $2 billion to prove that one man could create the nation’s academic standards by buying off almost every group that mattered.

    He wanted teachers to be evaluated based on test scores, and Ducan gave that to him too.

    But says Cody, everything failed.

  6. Gates Foundation, divest from G4S

    The Stanford Class of 2014 Commencement speakers, Bill and Melinda Gates, are currently facing global scrutiny for their foundation’s $172 million investment in G4S, the world’s largest private military and security company. As graduating seniors, we would like to enumerate these concerns and discuss a new campaign, composed of a broad coalition of students that has formed to call upon the Gates Foundation to divest from G4S and other compromising industries and practices, such as privatized prisons, military contracting and labor exploitation.

    Because the Gates Foundation has been such a strong force in almost every area of philanthropy, it is very disturbing that it invests in a company like G4S, which is responsible for a litany of human rights abuses affecting many of the same communities that the Foundation targets for assistance. G4S operates private juvenile detention facilities in the United States as well as over 100 vehicles that bring captured undocumented immigrants to detention centers on the U.S./Mexico border. The company fails to properly house asylum seekers in UK detention centers, which resulted in the death of Jimmy Mubenga, who was killed while being deported to Angola, as well as the death of 15-year-old Gareth Myatt, who was killed while being restrained at a youth detention center.

05.27.14

Links 27/5/2014: Greenwald on GNU/Linux, Drupal Nets Massive VC

Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux for Lettuce

    During that time, Michaels’s computer-savvy son was messing around with alternative operating systems for his PC. Through him, Michaels learned about Linux and other software that was free to be used, altered, and shared by anyone. Linux came with a license that turned the concept of licensing on its head: Instead of restricting people from copying the product, it restricted people from restricting it or any of its offshoots. It marked the code indelibly as part of the commons.

  • China working on new Windows-like Linux OS after Windows 8 ban
  • Linux app lets you control fruit fly brains – with frikkin’ LASERS
  • Meet the Man Hired to Make Sure the Snowden Docs Aren’t Hacked

    When he got to Rio, Lee spent one entire day strengthening Greenwald’s computer, which at that point used Windows 8. Lee was worried spy agencies could break in, so he replaced the operating system with Linux, installed a firewall, disk encryption and miscellaneous software to make it more secure.

  • Techtalk: learning more about Linux

    Techtalk discussed the open source operating system Linux and where you can go to learn more about it.

    “The short answer is that as far as courses are concerned they are a little bit thin on the ground. There used to be a group called Ballarat Linux Users Group… there is also a group called Viclan which runs local area administration”.

    “Linux is a free open source operating system that is probably described as an alternative to Windows. It’s free, you can download it and it runs on most PC’s. Apple is excluded at this point in time but most PC’s that run Windows will run Linux”.

  • Desktop

    • Why Chromebooks Make More Sense Than Ever

      If you’ve been following the market share reports, you know that Chromebooks–portable computers running Google’s cloud-centric Chrome OS platform–are starting to succeed, especially in several niche markets such as the education market. Additionally, PCMag.com has a big story out on why Microsoft should be worried about Chromebooks, and Business Insider has argued that Chromebooks are the best hardware choices for many users. The fact is, some new incentives from Google as well as some newfound forms of compatibility with popular applications make Chromebooks more viable than they ever have been.

  • Server

    • The Companies That Support Linux: CoreOS

      As companies grow their data centers to accommodate more cloud services and applications, their resource management practices also grow increasingly complex. CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that uses containers to help manage these massive server deployments.

      On May 19, CoreOS joined the Linux Foundation as a corporate member, along with Rackspace Hosting and Cumulus Networks. All three companies are playing a crucial role in the data center transformation and see open source as the lynchpin for optimal scalability, efficiencies, security and data center savings.

    • Define your network in software with OpenDaylight

      For years, the traditional model in networking was for much of the work to be done in hardware. But with the rise of cloud computing and virtualization, and the need for networks to become more agile and flexible than ever, a trend is beginning to take hold to take networking in the same direction that computing has gone. We are seeing more and more that the networking functions traditionally done in the datacenter by dedicated, almost exclusively proprietary hardware and software combinations, are now being defined through software.

  • Kernel Space

    • Apple Thunderbolt Driver Might Be Added To Linux

      An open-source Thunderbolt driver for supporting Apple MacBooks might be added to the Linux 3.16 kernel.

      Going on for months has been a Linux driver to support Thunderbolt on Apple MacBook systems. A special driver is needed for supporting Thunderbolt on Apple hardware since Apple implemented Thunderbolt holt-plug support within their OS X driver rather than at the firmware level, which is where it’s implemented by other Thunderbolt devices.

    • WRITE YOUR FIRST LINUX KERNEL MODULE

      Probably the easiest way to start kernel programming is to write a module – a piece of code that can be dynamically loaded into the kernel and removed from it. There are limits to what modules can do – for example, they can’t add or remove fields to common data structures like process descriptors. But in all other ways they are full-fledged kernel-level code, and they can always be compiled into the kernel (thus removing all the restrictions) if needed. It is fully possible to develop and compile a module outside the Linux source tree (this is unsurprisingly called an out-of-tree build), which is very convenient if you just want to play a bit and do not wish to submit your changes for inclusion into the mainline kernel.

    • BFQ Scheduler Still Trying For The Mainline Linux Kernel

      BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler that shares a lot of code with the CFQ scheduler. The Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ) scheduler has long been part of the mainline tree but BFQ hasn’t been pulled yet even after many revisions and comments. The next opportunity for BFQ to land would be with the Linux 3.16 kernel whose merge window will be opening in June. New features of BFQ with the latest work includes low latency for interactive applications, low latency for soft real-time applications, high throughput, strong fairness guarantees, etc.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Tablet Support Gets Figured Out For Libinput
      • Mesa Is At 1.4 Million Lines Of Code

        Mesa is up to 1.4 million lines of code and has already seen almost 2,500 Git commits so far this year.

        With Mesa 10.2 planned for release this week, this morning I ran GitStats on the Mesa Git code to look at the latest development trends for this open-source OpenGL library with the various mainline hardware drivers from Intel’s classic DRI driver to the Gallium3D architecture and its many drivers like Radeon, Nouveau, and Freedreno.

      • Mesa 10.2 Features Are Quite Exciting
      • Features You Will Not Find In Mesa 10.2

        Mesa 10.2 will be released very soon and while it does offer a lot of new features within its 1.4 million line code-base, it isn’t perfect and lacks some features still being sought after by open-source Linux fans.

      • NVIDIA vs. AMD 2D Performance Benchmarks

        Yesterday on Phoronix we had benchmarks of high-end NVIDIA and AMD GPUs when looking at the Linux OpenGL performance on the proprietary drivers. For those more concerned about the 2D performance of the modern GeForce and Radeon graphics cards, here’s some benchmarks for you.

      • AMD Catalyst 14.6 Beta Driver Coming Soon To Linux

        The first beta release of the Catalyst 14.6 proprietary Linux graphics driver will soon be available.

        The Catalyst 14.6 Linux driver will introduce official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support, install improvements by having better defaults and prompting to auto-install the packages generated by the driver, and various bug-fixes are landing.

      • Catalyst 14.6 Beta Now Available For AMD Linux Gamers

        Since writing about the features of the Catalyst 14.6 Beta earlier today, the x86/x86_64 proprietary Linux driver has surfaced on a third-party web-site for those wishing to try out this latest AMD Linux graphics driver.

        As explained this morning, Catalyst 14.6 Beta for Linux comes with official Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support, driver installer improvements, and various bug-fixes as the primary changes.

    • Benchmarks

      • High-End NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon Linux Gaming Comparison

        After last week carrying out separate NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks and similar AMD Radeon Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu 14.04 tests, today we are pitting the GeForce and Radeon graphics cards against each other on Ubuntu Linux with the very latest drivers to see how their performance compares now head-on. With this testing we have some Steam games plus are also monitoring the power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and GPU thermal metrics.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment: EFL and Elementary 1.10 release plan

      We aim for a 12 weeks release cycle which is a little under three months. The schedule is divided into 4 distinct parts: a 4 weeks development period which allows for features and fixes to get commit followed by a 1 week stabilization period which allows only fixes to be committed into the master branch. We then repeat the 4 weeks development period followed by a 3 weeks stabilization period to complete our schedule.

    • Enlightenment EFL 1.10 Released

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Want AppStream metadata for your KDE project? Act now!

        Originally, my plan was to directly push metadata to most KDE projects. The problem is that there is no way to reach all maintainers and have them opt-out for getting metadata pushed to their repositories. There is also no technical policy for a KDE project, since “KDE” is really only about the community right now, and there are no technical criteria a project under the KDE umbrella has to fulfill (at least to my knowledge, in theory, even GTK+ projects are perfectly fine within KDE).

      • Monday Report: Wallpaper Edition

        So what are we looking for? Photo wallpapers, illustration wallpapers or graphical and abstract wallpapers are all accepted for submission, personally I would suggest to avoid text elements or logo’s entirely – the theme we’re going for is a hopeful futurism but this should be considered something to focus around, not a prerequisite.

      • Randa: Moving KDE Forward

        The Randa Meetings really bring KDE and its software forward. But as most of the participants are young people, students (and we try to bring new people to every KDE sprint), parents or just can’t afford the travel costs, we need some help.

      • Qt3D 2.0 Is A Rewrite Of Qt’s 3D Support

        Two years ago the Qt3D module was showing lost of promise for 3D support within the popular, cross-platform toolkit. However, just before the Qt 5.0 release, Nokia shutdown their Qt Brisbane office that among other Qt modules was responsible for the work on Qt3D. Nokia’s late actions with Qt prior to selling it off to Digia was a a big blow and led to Qt3D being demoted. Fortunately, Qt3D 2.0 is coming along as a maintained, rewritten version of the 3D support for Qt.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Review: KaOS 2014.04

      This distribution caught my eye from a DistroWatch review. That review concludes that it isn’t clear exactly what the goal of this distribution is. Looking at the website more, I can’t say that it’s any clearer to me either. All I can glean is that this distribution aims to please more experienced users with a rolling-release model, maintain a small base of packages so that those will be polished before use, and target newer computers by using KDE and only 64-bit releases. I’ll have to try this distribution out to see if there is any more information regarding the target audience of this distribution. I tried KaOS on a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.

    • How Handy HandyLinux Is?

      HandyLinux 1.5 is a nice looking system. It reacts quickly to your actions, snappy and fast. It is more or less easy on resources: only about 250 Mb of memory when idle, though you might expect even less from the Debian+Xfce combination.

      However, there are still some things for developers to look at. French roots are visible, menu can be extended for easier use, packages are missing or broken. That’s not something you would expect from a distribution that claims to be “Powered by Debian”.

    • Antergos 2014.05.26 Distro Powered by Numix Looks Stunning

      Antergos 2014.05.26, a distribution based on Arch Linux that used to go by the name of Cinnarch, has been released and is now available for download.

      The only RC for Antergos was launched only a few days ago and now the final version of this very interesting OS has arrived. Besides the normal updates and improvements that are to be expected from a new build, the developers have also integrated a unique theme developed by the Numix project, which really sets this OS apart.

    • BackTrack Successor Kali Linux 1.0.7 Arrives with Linux Kernel 3.14

      As usually, Kali Linux 1.0.7 features various new tools, updated applications, as well as numerous fixes in order to make Kali Linux a more stable and reliable Linux operating system. This includes a new version of the Linux kernel, among other things.

      There are numerous Linux distributions in the open source ecosystem, but there are very few built specifically for penetration testing and digital forensics. The former iteration of this distro, BackTrack, is one of the most downloaded OSes and it’s the go-to operating system when you need a professional solution.

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Xfce 0.8.10 RC1 Is Ready for Testing, Now Based on Xfce 4.11

        Manjaro has slowly become one of the best Arch-based distributions, and the Xfce flavor is powering on with the first Release Candidate in the new 0.8.10 series. This is not the first flavor that gets a release in this new branch, but it’s one of the most popular.

        Despite what users might think, most of the Manjaro flavors are actually developed by the community and not by a central team. In fact, the Manjaro ecosystem is so large that it would be very difficult for just one team to take care of all the versions. Xfce, on the other hand, is an official one, so it might seem a little bit more polished than the others.

    • Slackware Family

      • Porteus Kiosk Edition Is an Operating System Based on Slackware and Firefox

        Porteus 3.1 (Kiosk Edition) is based on Slackware 14.0 and relies on Linux kernel 3.12.20 and Firefox 24.0. It’s a 32-bit system, which is entirely locked down to prevent tampering with any of the components (including the browser).

        “This distribution release includes bug fixes, software updates and new features. At a mere 50 megabytes, the Porteus Kiosk Edition ISO includes just the libraries and utilities required to run Firefox in a secure environment, making this a perfect fit for kiosks and other web terminals.”

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • After Debian Jessie Gets Stable, Kwheezy Will Change Its Name To Kebian

        Kwheezy is a Debian 7 Wheezy fork that uses KDE as the default desktop environment. While the name is very intuitive, making reference to both KDE and Wheezy, there will be a problem when Debian Jessie will become the stable Debian version, because the name will not match any more.

      • wattOS R8 review – Debian greenie

        Lightweight Linux distributions are inherently energy saving. By definition you’re using a fewer resources to run your system, which in turn requires less power and electrical draw. Throw in some power-efficient hardware and idle power draw will be minimal. These lightweight systems – while naturally energy-conserving – don’t normally include any specific optimisations for power saving. This is where wattOS comes in.

        While also lightweight, wattOS strives to strike a balance between conservative code and usability. The net result is a little less wattage while idle and a longer-lasting laptop battery when disconnected. It’s the usability part that is very important to wattOS: something like Puppy Linux or Tiny Core may likely be less resource-intensive while idle, however you need to make some level of sacrifice regarding the desktop and available software to use these distros.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • LightDM 1.11.2 Released for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn)

            LightDM is a display manager that’s mainly used in Ubuntu distributions, but users will find it in other Ubuntu-based distros as well. It’s not a visible part of the operating system and it’s not something that users interact with at any level.

            The LightDM development has been going at a steady pace and its devs have just released a new version that is designed for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn). It doesn’t have too many changes, but there are a couple of interesting ones.

          • Cinnamon PPA will no longer be maintained for Ubuntu users

            Gwendal Le Bihan, maintainer of the Cinnamon PPA, has confirmed he will be discontinuing the popular desktop environment. At least the stable releases the community has become accustomed to that is. The development of the Cinnamon desktop environment will continue through development builds in a separate nightly PPA.

          • Ubuntu Users Will No Longer Have a Cinnamon PPA
          • Leadwerks partners with Ubuntu for Linux games development

            The firms said they will make the Leadwerks Game Engine software development framework available in the Ubuntu Software Center to provide users of the operating system with a powerful tool for rapid game development under Ubuntu Linux.

          • Leadwerks Game Engine Pushed Into The Ubuntu Store
          • Linux users rejoice, here’s Ubuntu on the Surface Pro 3

            The good news is that it seems like there are only a few small things in between a Linux user and a decent Surface Pro 3 experience, and with any luck by the time these devices hit shelves there will be people eager to help implement fixes for most, if not all of these issues.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • RhinoLINUX Lite Xfce Edition 7.0 Is Based on Xubuntu 13.10 and Linux Mint 16

              RhinoLINUX 7.0 has been dubbed “Saucy SUZIE” and the code name betrays the roots of the distribution. The developers have used more than just one base for their operating system, namely Xubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and Linux Mint 16 (Petra). This is rather unusual, especially if we take into consideration the fact that Ubuntu 13.10 is about to reach end of life in a couple of months.

            • Mint 17 the Best, Foe to Friend, and KaOS Review

              Topping our coverage tonight, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declares Linux “Mint 17 the best Linux desktop to date.” Terrence O’Brien describes his journey with Linux as from foe to friend, sort of. And finally tonight, KDE tablet Vivaldi appears to be defunct and KaOS gets the once-over.

            • Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr : Video Review and Screenshot Tour

              Ubuntu Studio 14.04 LTS trusty tahr is the latest version official ubuntu-derived that based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu Studio is free and open source operating system based on ubuntu that dedicated for users and professionals who want an operating system that already includes several open source software for managing and editing multimedia files.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Imagination, partners form Prpl open source group for MIPS
  • When Apache Projects Die. Click.

    Open-source projects come and go all the time. In the Apache world though there is a prescribed process by which the ‘going’ happens that is somewhat unique in the world of open-source software development.

  • The true value of open source is people

    Open source is valuable. Very few people would argue that point. There is most definitely a sense of intrinsic worth. But where does this value exist? Is it in the code produced or in something else?

  • Coexisting in software-defined storage : Open source & best-of-breed can survive

    EMC is known for its storage appliances that relied on its hardware, but the company is quickly adapting to a software-defined industry. Paving the way for the future, EMC’s Advanced Software Division, led by Salvatore DeSimone is attempting to change the way people use and deploy IT. TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante talked with DeSimone at EMC World 2014 about EMC’s vision for the future of software-led enterprise.

  • Events

    • Professors headed to open source summer camp

      Ellis, Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University in Springfield, MA, and Hislop, Associate Dean in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, are co-organizers of the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), an annual conference that invites educators from across the country to learn how they can incorporate open source tools—and open source values—into their classrooms. It begins May 28 at Drexel University.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • TRY FIRA SANS, A FREE FONT FAMILY COMMISSIONED BY MOZILLA

        In 2013, the Mozilla Foundation commissioned Erik Spiekermann, a famous typographer, to work on a free, open source font family called Fira Sans (initially called Feura Sans).

        Recently, the typeface was updated to version 3.1, getting 12 different weights (bringing the weights number to 16), all accompanied by italic styles, a huge character map and extensive language supports. There’s also a monospaced variant: Fira Mono which includes 2 weights (regular and bold).

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

    • CMS Award Reflections: Hippo CMS Wins Best Open Source Solution of 2013
    • When digital marketing meets open source

      It’s a product that actually costs nothing, is up against entrenched competitors, and exists in a category that enterprises have in the past been wary of. All in all, marketing open source to marketers was probably never going to be an easy job.

      So you might forgive Tom Wentworth if he was a little wary of taking up the role of chief marketing officer at Acquia. But the CMO says that when he received a message from a recruiter asking if he was interested in the position, he jumped at the chance. “I couldn’t have dialled back the number faster when I saw him asking about Acquia,” Wentworth says.

    • Acquia, Focused on Drupal, Closes $50 Million Financing Round

      Here at OStatic, we’ve repeatedly covered Acquia, the small company that focuses on the popular Drupal content management system (CMS). OStatic runs on Drupal, which is known for its modularity and flexibility, and countless sites around the web depend on it. Now, Acquia has closed a $50 million financing round, bringing total investment in the company to $118.6 million. Led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the round includes new investor Split Rock Partners as well as existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and Tenaya Capital. Ravi Viswanathan, general partner at NEA, will also join Acquia’s Board of Directors.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Swiss open source resource site now bilingual

      Switzerland’s ‘OSS directory’, an open source directory service offered and maintained by /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group, is now available in German and French. The register now lists 276 open source service providers, 374 open source solutions and 283 reference documents. The bilingual site was officially unveiled last Saturday in Geneva, during the Fetons Linux conference and trade fair.

    • Adullact to award open source development project

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Public access to works supported by new alliance

        The founders of Authors Alliance are U.C. Berkeley Professors: Carla Hesse (Department of History and Dean of Social Sciences), Thomas Leonard (School of Journalism and University Librarian), Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley Law School and School of Information), and myself. I’m a professor at Berkeley Law who focuses on the law of both tangible property (land, cars, etc.) and intellectual property (copyrights, patents, etc.).

      • Is Elsevier going to take control of us and our data? The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge thinks so and I’m terrified

        I am gutted that I missed the Q+A session with Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz the Vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. It doesn’t seem to have been advertised widely – only 17 people went – and it deserves to be repeated.

        [...]

        Elsevier has bought Mendeley – a social network for managing academic bibliography. Scientists put their current reading into Mendeley and use it to look up others. Mendeley is a social network which knows who you are, and who you are working with.

        Do you trust Mendeley? Do you trust Elsevier? Do you trust and large organisations without independent control (GCHQ, NSA, Google, Facebook)? If you do, stop reading and don’t worry.

        In Mendeley, Elsevier has a window onto nearly everything that a scientist is interested in. Every time your read a new paper Mendeley knows what you are interested in. Mendeley knows your working habits – what time are you spending on your research?

    • Open Hardware

      • Open source VR headset takes on Oculus

        The designs for the ANTVR headset itself and its nifty convertible game controller are proprietary technology. But the designs and firmware for the wireless receiver — which sits between the headset, the controller, and the gaming console — are open source. That opens up a range of possibilities, such as creating custom controllers or using the ANTVR controller to control other devices.

        For example, ANTVR co-founder Qin Zheng says you could write software for using ANTVR to control a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot, perhaps using the headset to watch the feed from the bot’s on-board camera. You could also make your own version of the receiver specifically designed to work with a game console or device not officially supported by ANTVR. “You can use the signal straight from the USB port,” Zheng says. “We will give the developer all the documentation and libraries.”

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Developer Calls For HTTP 2.0 To Be Thrown Out

      Open-source developer Poul-Henning Kamp is pushing for the HTTP Working Group to toss out their current work on the HTTP 2.0 standard and to start over.

    • PHK: HTTP 2.0 Should Be Scrapped

      Via the HTTP working group list comes a post from Poul-Henning Kamp proposing that HTTP 2.0 (as it exists now) never be released after the plan of adopting Google’s SPDY protocol with minor changes revealed flaws that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 will not address.

Leftovers

  • Pope Francis makes unofficial stop at Israeli terrorism memorial

    Detour, at request of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, seen as attempt to appease hosts after stop at separation wall

  • Science

    • Space Hackers Prepare to Reboot 35-Year-Old Spacecraft

      Early next week, a team of volunteers will use the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to see if they can make contact with a spacecraft that hasn’t fired its thrusters since 1987. If all goes well, the effort could bring the 35-year-old spacecraft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), back into position near the Earth, where it could once again study the effect of solar weather on Earth’s magnetosphere.

    • [Old] The Republican Street Fight Over Transparency in Government

      Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The fruit of Nato’s war in Libya are the coups and terror spreading across Africa
    • Freedom Cheaper than Iraq War

      A particularly mendacious lie by Danny Alexander puts the institutional start-up costs of Scottish Independence at £1.5 billion. That is a cool half billion pounds cheaper than Scotland’s share of the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars, even on the Westminster government’s blatant under-estimate of the war costs.

    • Veteran tells how killing a young German soldier haunted him for life

      He said it was the saddest moment of his life—which haunted him every night of his life, even while he knew this young kid would have killed him just the same. But that doesn’t matter. If you’re a normal human being, killing another human being will leave a mark on you.

      Obviously, Robertson was affected by PTSD. Today we know a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder and veterans of modern wars get treated for these and other mental illnesses derived from their time in combat. But, back then, little was known. Most people assume that PTSD is a relatively modern sickness, but the truth is that every soldier since the beginning of time has been exposed to the same extremely stressing moments, accidents, death, and atrocities that would leave any healthy person scarred for life. All of them—unless they were psychopaths—have suffered PTSD in various degrees.

    • Ukraine and the US fiasco driving Russia into the arms of China

      Besides ripping Ukraine apart – and getting scores of Ukrainians killed – the US-supported coup in February has injected more uncertainty into Europe’s economy and pushed Russia and China back together.

    • President Karzai Refuses US Offer for a Meeting with President Obama at Bagram Military Airbase
    • The World’s Most Humble President Just Opened His House to 100 Syrian Refugee Children

      One hundred children orphaned by the Syrian civil war could find a home in Uruguayan President José “Pepe” Mujica’s summer retreat, “a mansion and riverfront estate surrounded by rolling pastures,” according to Yahoo News. That would be a welcome sight for any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by Syria’s political turmoil.

    • Secret laws are a threat to American democracy

      Last week, the Obama administration signaled that it would finally declassify a secret memo detailing its justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens living abroad. The announcement came just hours before the Senate voted to confirmDavid Barron, the memo’s author, as President Barack Obama’s newest judicial appointee.

    • Robot warriors pose ethical dilemna

      According to a UN survey, civilians have been killed in 33 separate drone attacks around the world. In Pakistan, an estimated 2,200 to 3,300 people have been killed by drone attacks since 2004, 400 of whom were civilians. According to the latest figures from the Pakistani Ministry of Defense, 67 civilians have been killed in drone attacks in the country since 2008.

    • Why Risk Prison To Protest Drone Murders? An Activist Explains.

      Judging from my email box in recent years — which often differs on this question with such sources of knowledge as my television or the New York Times — the conscience of our country lies somewhere near Syracuse, New York.

    • Government blasé on Australian drone deaths

      While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.

    • Complicity of Australia and New Zealand in US Drone Assassinations
    • Obama’s Reprehensible Foreign Policy

      I was reading an editorial criticizing President Obama for not doing more in the international realm. Specifically, it suggested that he was too weak. He was supposedly not responding sufficiently to the alleged Russian threat to Ukraine, for instance. Another example is that some critics believe that the administration should have done more in response to the Arab Spring, in particular, offering more assistance. The editorial dribbled on.

    • America’s “War on Terror”: No U.S. Citizen Is Safe “Throughout the World”

      After the attack on Iraq a frequently heard comment from those with no interest in foreign affairs or much, from activists, journalists and political observers of all hues, was: “Soon no American or British citizen will be safe anywhere on earth, for decades to come. ”

    • Doubting Obama’s Resolve to Do Right

      As President Obama prepares to make another speech explaining his foreign policy, the question is whether he can climb out of the rut of his previous whiny apologies for continuing many of George W. Bush’s abuses, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote last year.

    • Barack Obama to make new bid to define foreign policy
    • Fear and anti Muslim bigotry are big business in America

      There has long been a concerted effort to demonize Muslims in the American Homeland as a part of the never-ending big money maker that is the phony war on terror. Big media of course plays a critical role in the dark propaganda campaigns that ensure that millions of Americans will continue to see the menace of al Qaeda and worse lurking in the darkest corner of their closets and under their beds. The connection is never made that the military and security industrial complex need the ongoing Muslim bogeyman to keep those god blessed dollars rolling in and to keep the war machine running on high. The business of America anymore – particularly since September 11, 2001 – is death, as in selling arms, financing repression and peddling surveillance technology against dissidents to friendly tyrants. The wars that drive what is left of the economy must go on as they always will in our own version of Oceania.

    • UNICEF’s polio advisor says CIA revelations led to deaths of vaccine workers

      He’s now the principal polio advisor for the United Nations children’s organisation. He is in Australia this week and he joined me in The World Today studio, shortly after stepping off the plane.

    • The C.I.A.’s Deadly Ruse in Pakistan

      The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.

    • Were the media right to not disclose CIA operative’s name?

      Politico is reporting Monday that the White House inadvertently identified the Central Intelligence Agency’s top official in Afghanistan on Sunday, sending his name among the list of officials briefing President Barack Obama on security conditions in Afghanistan during his surprise trip there.

      Obama stopped at the Bagram Air Base outside Kabul on his trip to show support for the troops during the US Memorial Day weekend.

    • Chris Hedges “The American Public Is Utterly Misinformed On What’s Happening In Ukraine”

      It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war

    • U.S. Training Elite Antiterror Troops in Four African Nations

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CNN’s Climate Change Coverage: Starring Ann Coulter

      For those not up to speed: Game show host Pat Sajak tweeted this: “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends. Good night.” It was all in jest, you see–though Sajak seems to be dismissive of climate change nonetheless.

      And CNN’s Pat-Sajak’s-opinion-of-climate-change guest? Well, far-right bombthrower Ann Coulter, of course.

    • Government sets logging sights on ‘precious jewel’ of B.C. forests

      Gambier Island sits in the heart of Howe Sound, a thickly forested, dark green hump of land surrounded by a blue ocean, just around the corner from the urban sprawl of Metro Vancouver.

    • Wanted: a breed of chicken that can survive crippling heatwaves

      US scientists fear climate change could have devastating effects on poultry farmers as temperatures reach scorching levels

    • China tries to make artificial lake, fails and creates desert instead

      Officials in Zhengzhou, China, wanted to build an artificial lake on the outskirts of the city but everything went wrong. The source of water they intended to use dried up and the hundreds of thousands of tons of sand destined for the artificial beach began to spread, covering an area the size of four football fields.

    • The Crazy Genius Behind Solar Roadways

      Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what Scott and Julie Brusaw hope to accomplish with their ongoing Solar Roadways project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign.

      The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs.

  • Finance

  • Politics/PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Nick Griffin concedes European parliament seat as BNP votes fall away

      Arriving at Manchester town hall on Sunday night, Griffin came under attack from protesters shouting “Nazi scum off our streets”. Some were rugby tackled by police after throwing placards at him reading “Nick Griffin Must Go”, with one attempting to land a punch on the BNP man.

      Speaking after his defeat, Griffin blamed Ukip for taking the BNP’s vote. Asked whether the people of the north-west had rejected his party’s racist and fascist policies, he said: “They’ve voted for Ukip’s racist policies instead.”

      He added: “Ukip want to keep out white Poles but let in huge numbers of Pakistanis and Africans.”

    • Euro Values

      Brian Taylor of BBC Scotland said last night he picked up at Holyrood that the other unionist parties were pleased that UKIP had won the former Lib Dem seat in Scotland and stopped the SNP getting a third. That was the most revealing moment of last night for me – it showed the vicious irresponsibility of the Better Together campaign, and exposed the lie that UKIP are outsiders.

      [...]

      The BBC’s promotion of UKIP again explodes the myth of UKIP as outsiders.

    • Elections In Middle Earth

      My take from the European election results is the UK has voted to remove many of its experienced politicians from Brussels and to leave the EPP and S&D to run the show. By promoting UKIP, we now have eleven fewer elected representatives working on our behalf to improve the UK’s position as new policy evolves, and even if they did suddenly decide to represent us — instead of voting in favour of things like the ivory trade and against flood prevention “to make a point” — they have no parliamentary colleagues they are willing to work with among the other nationalist parties to produce change.

      The same story in other countries means the intact set of experienced political operators is from Germany, and the dominant influence from the UK will come from Labour acting within the S&D party who came second in the election. The UK’s ability to influence has been dangerously harmed and the euro-sceptic influence has moved even further from the levers of control (the UK’s Conservatives had already quit EPP by forming a new minority party) leaving pro-europeans from EPP, ALDE, Greens and S&D in control.

    • European Elections: 9 Scariest Far-Right Parties Now In The European Parliament
    • European elections: six countries that went left, not right

      The People’s party was one of the few governing parties to win the largest portion of the vote. But it’s the large gains by leftwing parties that are exciting political commentators. Between them, the two dominant political parties (People’s party and Socialist party) lost five million votes compared with their 2009 performance. Meanwhile, the protest party Podemos (“We can”) took nearly 8% of the vote and five seats. Podemos was formed only four months ago, having grown out of the Spanish indignados who camped out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square in 2011. Coalition group United Left also gained around 12 seats, further increasing the voice of the left in parliament. “It’s the hour of the people. This is only the beginning,” Podemos’s leader Pablo Iglesias, tweeted. “Clearly, we can.”

    • Federal Judge Who Halted Walker Dark Money Criminal Probe Attended Koch-Backed Judicial Junkets

      The federal judge who ordered a halt to Wisconsin’s “John Doe” criminal investigation into spending during the 2011 and 2012 recall elections has regularly attended all-expenses paid “judicial junkets” funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and other ideological and corporate interests.

      On May 6, federal District Court Judge Rudolph Randa blocked an ongoing John Doe criminal probe into allegedly illegal coordination between nonprofit groups like Wisconsin Club for Growth, which spent $9.1 million on electoral ads during Wisconsin’s recall elections, and the recall campaigns of Governor Scott Walker and state senators. John Doe investigations are similar to grand jury investigations, and Wisconsin Club for Growth — and its director, Eric O’Keefe, a longtime compatriot of the Koch brothers — asked the federal court to stop the probe, alleging it violated their “free speech” rights.

  • Censorship

    • Editor navigated Fiji’s media censorship

      Laisa Taga, a leading Fijian journalist and editor, has died in Suva, Fiji, aged 56.

      For more than 30 years, Laisa worked in a range of media and served as mentor for other female journalists. She was the first woman to edit a daily newspaper in Fiji, and most recently served as editor-in-chief of Islands Business International, publisher of the leading regional news and business magazine for the Pacific Islands.

      Originally from Votua village on the island of Vanua Levu, Laisa studied at Adi Cakobau School (ACS), the elite school for young Fijian women.

  • Privacy

    • Discussion with Richard Stallman about Surveillance, the Future of Internet, Life, the Universe and Everything

      Richard Stallman, inventor of the principles of Free/libre software and founder of the Free Software Foundation gave us the immense pleasure and honour of sitting down with us for an open discussion.

      Interviewed by Jérémie Zimmermann when he was still a full-time employee of La Quadrature du Net, Richard speaks in great length about surveillance and how to take back control of our communications, as well as about the future of the Internet and computing. Through the philosophy of Free/libre software he delivers his vision for better democratic processes and for a better society. He also brushes topics related to life, the Universe, and Everything ;)

    • US may block visas for Chinese hackers attending DefCon, Black Hat
    • Facebook Launches NSA-Style Auto-Eavesdropping Feature

      “I hope there are people who love the feature and post more,” says Facebook’s product manager excitedly about the new feature they just added. We suspect people will not… As The WSJ reports, starting Wednesday, the app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users. Read that again… ‘in the vicinity of users’. In other words, Facebook is unveiling its own NSA-style eavesdropping feature (on you and all your friends). Don’t worry though… even if users decide not to share what they’re hearing or watching, Facebook will hold onto the data in anonymous form, keeping tabs on how many users watched particular shows. Sound familiar?

    • Hidden Cameras in Care Homes

      On Monday our acting director, Emma Carr, took part in a workshop organised by the Care Quality Commission on the topic of covert surveillance in care homes. The session was organised by Andrea Sutcliffe, Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care at the CQC, and she has shared her thoughts on the session which you can read here.

    • Austria Constant Partner of NSA: Journalist

      American journalist Glenn Greenwald has said in an interview with newspaper Der Standard on Monday that Austria “constantly” works together with the American National Security Agency (NSA).

      This came despite recent claims from Austrian Minister for Defence Gerald Klug that the two work together only “occasionally.”

    • Glenn Greenwald to publish list of U.S. citizens that NSA spied on

      Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA.

      “One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer,” Mr. Greenwald told The Sunday Times of London.

    • Greenwald’s Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance

      The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.

      Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.

    • Light Version of Oversight

      The USA Freedom Act passed by the House – advertised as ending bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under the Patriot Act – barely scratches the surface. Its main achievement: requiring the foreign intelligence court to vet N.S.A. selection terms used to sift through Americans’ phone, Internet and financial records. Sounds good, right? That’s because the N.S.A. talks about selection terms as being things like phone numbers or email addresses, suggesting that they are targeted at specific bad guys. But in negotiations, the administration insisted on leaving open the definition of selectors. As Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, explained, it is now “so vague that it could be used to collect all of the phone records in a particular area code, or all of the credit card records from a particular state.”

    • FreedomWorks working to stop the NSA

      A grassroots organization hopes its lawsuit related to the National Security Agency’s surveillance program will soon make its way to the Supreme Court.

      As a private citizen, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) in February joined with FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group, in filing a U.S. District Court lawsuit in the District of Columbia against President Obama and top intelligence officials over NSA surveillance.

    • NSA whistle blower says he is considering a move back home
    • Security Industry Fights Surveillance State with Words

      As posted originally on securitycurrent. Full disclosure per Forbes policy: All of the vendors mentioned in this post have been my clients for strategic advisory services during the last ten years.

      Cisco’s General Counsel Mark Chandler on May 13 reacted strongly to further news of NSA exploiting Cisco gear, sparked in part by the publication of Glenn Greenwald’s book on Snowden and the leaked documents.

    • The United States’ Global Surveillance Record

      In October 2012, President Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 20, ordering America’s national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for U.S. cyber-attacks. The directive also stated that what it called Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) offered unique, unconventional capabilities to advance U.S. national objectives around the world, giving little or no warning to potential adversaries or targets.

    • Investigation confirms U.S. snooping activities against China: report

      A Chinese Internet information body on Monday said an investigation spanning several months has confirmed “the existence of snooping activities directed against China” as exposed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

    • MEDIA WINDOW: Data pirates in the Caribbean

      THE U.S.NATIONAL Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas says a TRANSCEND Media Service report.

    • NDP Wants Privacy, Security Experts To Probe Warrantless Data Gathering

      The federal New Democrats are calling for a group of independent experts to investigate warrantless data collection by the federal government.

      The Official Opposition says it also wants the group to recommend ways to ensure the privacy of Canadians is protected in the digital era.

    • U.S. conducts unscrupulous secret surveillance programs across world: report

      On March 29 this year, the German news magazine Der Spiegel, citing a secret document from Snowden, revealed that 122 world leaders were under NSA surveillance in 2009, and the agency maintained a secret database on world leaders which included 300 files on Merkel.

    • China report slams U.S. for ‘unscrupulous’ surveillance

      eijing accused the United States on Monday of “unscrupulous” cyber surveillance that included large-scale computer attacks against the Chinese government and Chinese companies.

      “America’s spying operations have gone far beyond the legal rationale of “anti-terrorism” and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity,” concluded a report prepared by the China Academy of Cyber Space.

    • Can I see what information the feds have on my travel?

      Lately I’ve been on something of a public records binge. I asked for records about my license plate reader data from local law enforcement agencies. I asked for complaint records from the Federal Trade Commission about a sketchy Bitcoin mining hardware maker. A few more requests are still pending.

    • Facebook Wants To Listen In On What You’re Doing

      Facebook is rolling out a new feature for its smartphone app that can turn on users’ microphones and listen to what’s happening around them to identify songs playing or television being watched. The pay-off for users in allowing Facebook to eavesdrop is that the social giant will be able to add a little tag to their status update that says they’re watching an episode of Games of Thrones as they sound off on their happiness (or despair) about the rise in background sex on TV these days.

    • John Faulkner voices spying fears after parliament CCTV captures meeting

      Senator seen in parliamentary footage being used to discipline government department employee

    • China Said to Push Banks to Remove IBM Servers for Security

      The Chinese government is pushing domestic banks to remove high-end servers made by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and replace them with a local brand, according to people familiar with the matter, in an escalation of the dispute with the U.S. over spying claims.

  • Civil Rights

    • ‘Big money’ is backing Modi to end resistance, says Arundhati Roy
    • Fixing U.S. intervention capabilities in Cuba

      What people think seemingly has little effect on ending what Cubans say is the longest and cruelest economic blockade in human history. Polls show overall U.S. disapproval, Cuban-Americans included. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected the blockade. The prestigious Atlantic Council NGO recently disapproved. Former high-profile blockade defenders in Florida, notably gubernatorial candidate Charley Crist and Cuban-American sugar baron Alfonso Fajul, changed their thinking. U.S. food producers, Illinois corn producers most recently, have called for new regulatory arrangements allowing exports to expand.

    • Nazis Attack City Hall in Dortmund, Germany
    • FBI chief says anti-marijuana policy hinders the hiring of cyber experts

      FBI cyber recruits “want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey says.

    • Journalist Calls for Accountability in Police Killings

      When one thinks about law enforcement, it’s safe to assume that its purpose is to ensure the compliance of the law; its purpose is to serve the greater good of its people. If the law and government fail to give justice to its citizens, then what good is it? The government is meant to provide a set of rules for people to adhere to and when not obliged, there are consequences for that action. Under the government there are police who are there to oversee that the law is being followed. So why is it that when the police are killing innocent people, they are not being punished as equally as regular civilians? Is it that the badge or title plays a role in how severe the punishment is, or that the police even get punished at all? Is the badge a “get out of jail free card”?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Europe’s Pirate Parties are sinking, but they’ve already won

        The 2014 European elections haven’t been kind to the various Pirate Parties, which campaign for digital rights, free speech and decriminalisation of filesharing. In their native Sweden, the Pirates lost both their MEPs, dropping from a 7.1 percent vote share to just 2.2 percent. In Finland where high-profile activist Peter Sunde was campaigning, the party balloted just 0.7 percent. In Britain, the three Pirate Party candidates secured just 8,597 votes combined — just 0.5 percent

        [...]

        Despite the movement’s founder and loudest voice, Rick Falkvinge, claiming on his blog that the results are a “strong improvement”, it’s clear that this is a bit of a washout for the European Pirates. Their gains in Sweden in 2009 came in the wake of the the high-profile trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay, but it’s impossible to argue that 2013′s Snowden revelations and recent renewed interest in net neutrality wouldn’t push traditional Pirate issues towards the forefront of voters’ minds in this election.

        [...]

        Once the dust has settled, the only cornerstone Pirate policy remaining will be a decriminalisation of filesharing. That’s unlikely to happen for the time being — the rapid growth of legal streaming services is increasingly rendering filesharing irrelevant, and the entertainment industry’s arguments that it could kill their fledgling attempts to manage the digital transition seem to hold water with most politicians.

        [...]

        Pirate Parties may have had a terrible election but, in Europe at least, Pirate politics is here to stay.

      • Pirate Party Keeps a Seat At The European Parliament

        A few hours after all polling booths across Europe closed, it now becomes clear that the Pirate Party has kept a seat at the European Parliament. The results show that the Pirates won one seat in Germany. That’s also the only one, although the Czech Republic Pirates came awfully close.

05.26.14

Links 26/5/2014: Chromebook Prospects, China and GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 60 Open Source Apps You Can Use in the Cloud

    The open source community is participating in this race to the cloud in two key ways. First, much open source software, particularly software for enterprises and small businesses, is now available on a SaaS basis. This provides customers with quality, low-cost applications and eliminates the hassles of deploying software on their own servers. At the same time, it gives open source companies a viable business model that allows them to make money from their technology.

  • Open source cloud hosting environment built in Swiss data centre

    A research lab at Zurich’s University of Applied Science has helped a data centre provider to create a new open source cloud hosting environment for its European research and development program.

  • Source Serif: Adobe’s New Open Source Typeface

    Adobe has released its 100th Typeface family, Source Serif, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Adobe Originals font library. Source Serif is an open-source font available via Adobe Typekit or via SourceForge.

  • GroundWork Unveils OpenStack Open Source Cloud Monitoring Tool

    OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, offers some metering tools as parts of the core OpenStack code. But it lacks a robust performance monitoring framework, which is why GroundWork has rolled out a new solution for tracking the performance of various parts of the OpenStack public and private cloud infrastructure.

  • Hadoop security: Hortonworks buys XA Secure – and plans to turn it open source

    Hortonworks says the deal struck this week to acquire XA Secure will help provide a comprehensive approach to Hadoop security for the first time.

  • Trendnet Embraces Open Source DD-WRT Firmware for Select Wireless AC Routers
  • TRENDnet(R) Announces Open Source DD-WRT Compatibility for Wireless AC Routers
  • Out in the Open: Take Back Your Privacy With This Open Source WhatsApp

    SnapChat settled with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this month over a complaint that its privacy claims were misleading, as reported by USA Today, and last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a report listing the company as the least privacy-friendly tech outfit it reviewed, including Comcast, Facebook, and Google. Last year, WhatsApp faced privacy complaints from the Canadian and Dutch governments, and like Snapchat, its security has been an issue as well.

  • Open source light sabre with Virtual Reality IMAX headset
  • Salesagility release 3 new open source versions of SuiteCRM to target Salesforce
  • To help Hadoop adoption, Hortonworks to make security tools open-source
  • Clinovo to launch new Clincapture open source EDC system on May 23, 2014

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Text missing in chrome on Linux

        I’m in the process of trying Fedora 20 on my retina MacBook and I ran into a peculiar issue with Chrome. Some sites would load up normally and I could read everything on the page. Other sites would load up and only some of the text would be displayed. Images were totally unaffected.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla, a tale of gentrification

        The problem I see, however, is something I’ve witnessed for some time now, and while I’m aware that I will probably look like I’m howling with the pack (something I do not like at all) I believe I should come clean about it. This problem is about Mozilla itself, what it does, how it operates, its own standing within the Free and Open Source Software community and its revenue model. In fact, I believe all these points are tightly connected and discretely conspired to bring Mozilla where it is today. This is not to say that I don’t like what Mozilla does and has done. This is not to say that there isn’t a whole bunch of great people inside Mozilla: there are, I know several of them. This is not to say that Mozilla is not an exciting set of projects and ventures: I think it will continue to be exciting in the years to come. And many of us know what technology does to any project or company in just a few years: kill it or make it blossom.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.3 In Beta, Bringing Good Improvements

      The beta release of LibreOffice 4.3 is available this week with many new features being under development for this popular open-source office suite.

      Among the features being worked on for LibreOffice 4.3 is going from a 16-bit character limitation of Writer paragraphs to now 32-bit, changes to navigation buttons and other UI elements, DrawingML import/export support, proportional image scaling support, support for printing comments in margins, improved formula engine support within the Calc spreadsheet, auto detection of fax4CUPS printers, improved PDF importing, improved OOXML support, and many other changes.

  • CMS

    • White House contributes APIs, stages hackathons & runs on Drupal

      Director of new media technologies at the Executive Office of the President of the United State of America Leigh Heyman was recently reported to be the man behind all the modern interactive media delivered during Barack Obama’s last ‘state of the union’ address.

    • Orion Launches Open-Source Client Portal

      Orion announced in early May that it has launched a redesigned client portal that uses open-source code so other providers can build their own pages to integrate into the site.

  • Education

    • Damian Conway on Teaching, Programming Languages, Open Source and Our Future

      Damian Conway is well known in the Perl community and has worked on Perl 6 for many years; he’s a speaker and teacher, author of several technical books and Perl software modules, and runs an international IT training company, Thoughtstream, which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level in Europe, North America, and Australasia. His website is: http://damian.conway.org

  • Funding

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.8.3 Compiler Released

      For those that haven’t already moved over to the recently released GCC 4.9, the third point release to the GNU Compiler Collection 4.8 series has finally surfaced.

  • Public Services/Government

    • City of Vienna increasingly turns to open source

      The administration in the Austrian capital, Vienna, is expanding its use of open source solutions, including on its workstations, because of new requirements, open data, budget constraints and the major shift towards smartphones and tablets.

      “Open source helps to solve IT vendor lock-in situations”, Norbert Weidinger, ICT-Strategist for the city, said in a presentation on the city’s use of free and open source solutions.

      Open source is now well-established in the city’s main IT operations, according to the presentation which Weidinger delivered at a Major Cities of Europe conference in Dublin on 17 January. The city has 454 Linux servers (from a total of 2,000 servers), 270 Apache instances, uses Postgres to manage 380 databases and MySQL to manage another 90. Open source is used for file and printing services, for e-government services and for external and internal websites.

      “We’re promoting the use of open source products where possible”, Weidinger said.

      The IT department’s responsibilities include the IT in the city’s public healthcare, public schools and the administration of city-owned housing.

    • Opportunity

      In the UK, The National ICT Category Management Programme (NICTMP) is intended to guide local governments towards better IT, including using FLOSS. It’s about time. Many small businesses and governments are scarcely more skilled at IT than consumers and a little help can go a long way towards huge savings greater diversity and better IT. With FLOSS it’s easy to put up a web-server sharing information with the public and using open standards to ensure interoperability with minimal cost. I think savings of 20% are at the lower end of estimates. In my experience, software licences can save 20% of IT costs but ease of maintenance could do that again and getting full performance out of hardware purchases that much again. Local governments in UK spend hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware and software for IT each year. Break-even can be immediate if hardware is re-used by using FLOSS. Governments should be looking at savings of ~50% by using FLOSS. There’s a reason M$ and “partners” do what they do. It doubles the cost of IT making slaves of us all providing free labour. FLOSS works for us the users and not some monopolists.

    • New UK IT procurement model urges open standards

      A new model for IT procurement for local governments in the United Kingdom is urging public administrations to use open standards, to create room for agile and innovative software solutions including open source. One of the aims of the National ICT Commercial Category Strategy for Local Government is to reduce IT expenses by 10 to 20 percent over the next five years.

    • How governments are more collaborative with open source

      Technology is the easy part in government. The biggest challenges are cultural barriers – it’s a question of thinking in a more collaborative and open way, believes Ben Balter, Government Evangelist for GitHub, a social network for open source communities.

    • American elections are stuck in the 20th century. Here’s how to change that.

      Aneesh Chopra, President Obama’s choice to be the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer from 2009 to 2012, wants to do something about the problem. He is teaming up with a group called the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation to address the problem. Their plan: develop the software necessary to run an election and release it as an open-source project. Chopra and his colleagues believe that could lead to better election systems while simultaneously saving cash-strapped states money.

    • Open Source Lessons For Feds

      White House and agency IT leaders discuss how open source can empower government IT project teams, at FOSE conference in Washington, D.C.

  • Licensing

    • Scratch 2.0 editor and player now open source

      The latest version of a tool used to teach kids how to program video games, animations and interactive art is now open source. The Scratch 2.0 editor and player can now be found in GitHub under the GPL version 2 license.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • The LLVM 64-bit ARM64/AArch64 Back-Ends Have Merged

      Back in March Apple open-sourced their ARM 64-bit LLVM back-end (dubbed ARM64) many months after other ARM vendors had already developed a competing 64-bit ARM back-end (dubbed “AArch64″ as ARM’s official name for architecture). Since Apple opened up their back-end, Apple and outside LLVM developers have been working to converge the competing 64-bit ARM back-ends into a single 64-bit ARM target. That work is now complete.

    • Create a game with Scratch on Raspberry Pi

      While Scratch may seem like a very simplistic programming language that’s just for kids, you’d be wrong to overlook it as an excellent first step into coding for all age levels. One aspect of learning to code is understanding the underlying logic that makes up all programs; comparing two systems, learning to work with loops and general decision-making within the code.

    • Raspberry Pi Motion Camera: Part 2, using gphoto2
    • A Raspberry Pi motion-detecting wildlife camera

      I’ve been working on an automated wildlife camera, to catch birds at the feeder, and the coyotes, deer, rabbits and perhaps roadrunners (we haven’t seen one yet, but they ought to be out there) that roam the juniper woodland.

    • Clive: A New Operating System Written In The Go Language

      Clive is the new operating system announced on Friday and is written in Google’s Go programming language, features a “new weird file protocol” called ZX, and uses parts of the Plan 9 operating system. Clive is also going to run on a modified Nix kernel.

    • Open source Hoodie is tailored for quick app dev

      A quick option for building Web and iOS apps is on the horizon from a group of developers in Europe. Hoodie is an open source tool for building Web applications in days via an open source library described as being easier to use than JQuery.

Leftovers

  • Pope Francis to Call for Sovereign, Independent Palestinian State

    Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin is signaling that Pope Francis in his visit to Bethlehem on Sunday will strongly support the right of Palestinians to a sovereign state.

    Implicitly, Pope Francis will condemn the Apartheid system of military rule used by Israel in the West Bank, though he likely won’t use the word.

  • Haiku OS Adds Support For Latest Radeon HD Graphics Cards
  • Afghanistan strongly condemns recording of phone calls by U.S. NSA

    Amirzai Sangin, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Afghanistan said Sunday that the phone calls are recorded by devices which have been set up in the country to fight drugs smuggling.

    [...]

    Assange said that Afghanistan was the second country where NSA “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic and international phone calls.”

    Bahamas was revealed as one of the country where the phone calls were being recorded by National Security Agency in earlier reports; however the second country was called “country x.”

  • US Collecting All Cell Phone Calls in Afghanistan
  • White House mistakenly reveals name of top CIA officer in Afghanistan

    The White House inadvertently included the name of the top CIA official in Afghanistan on a list of participants in a military briefing with President Barack Obama that was distributed to reporters on Sunday, the Washington Post reported.

  • Oops! White House said to have blown cover of CIA chief in Afghanistan
  • CSG implements first napping station in UGLi

  • Science

    • Nobody Cares How Awesome You Are at Your Job

      In an article published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, University of California at San Diego behavioral scientist Ayelet Gneezy and University of Chicago business professor Nicholas Epley tracked people’s responses to three types of promises: broken ones, kept ones, and then ones that were fulfilled beyond expectations. And while it’s true that everyone gets upset when a promise is broken (I’m looking at you, housing-contractors-who-claim-bathroom-renovations-will-be-done-in-a-week), it turns out that overdelivering on something won’t make anyone significantly more impressed by your awesomeness.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Hacker Turned FBI Informant Sabu Will Be Sentenced Next Week

      Wired reports that Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu”, the LulzSec hacker who became an FBI informant and helped take down numerous other hackers, will be sentenced on Tuesday, May 27. The government will seek a sentence of just seven months, citing time served and his immense cooperation with the government.

    • Feds Seek 7-Month Sentence for LulzSec Hacker and Lower East Sider ‘Sabu’

      Anarchism and the Lower East Side go hand in hand, so should we be super surprised that one of the most notorious hackers of our day operated from within the Jacob Riis Houses on Avenue D?

      You’ll recall that in June 2011, hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, was caught by the FBI and quickly turned snitch. The high-ranking capture immediately paid dividends, as “Sabu” was the man who once led the outlaw LulzSec, an offshoot of the notorious Anonymous organization. With the new traitor status, he helped deliver a number of top hackers on a platter and still helps the bureau with his connections.

    • US seeks leniency for ‘Sabu,’ Lulzsec leader-turned-snitch

      U.S. prosecutors say a hacking group’s mastermind should be spared a long prison sentence due to his quick and fruitful cooperation with law enforcement.

      The man, Hector Xavier Monsegur of New York, is accused of leading a gang of international miscreants calling themselves “Lulzsec,” short for Lulz Security, on a noisy hacking spree in 2011, striking companies such as HBGary, Fox Entertainment and Sony Pictures.

      Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, led a high-profile campaign that taunted law enforcement, released stolen data publicly and bragged of their exploits on Twitter. Their campaign touched off a worldwide law enforcement action that resulted in more than a dozen arrests.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Private Group Sought to Arm Syrian Rebels

      For one group of Americans, that wasn’t enough. On their own, the Americans offered to provide 70,000 Russian-made assault rifles and 21 million rounds of ammunition to the Free Syrian Army, a major infusion they said could be a game changer. With a tentative nod from the rebels, the group set about arranging a weapons shipment from Eastern Europe, to be paid for by a Saudi prince.

    • Canada Is Selling Arms to Everyone It Can

      While Canada exports oil, maple syrup, and hockey players, it also deals a lot of arms. And Canadian military exports are growing: the latest available figures say sales jumped more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2011, with later years reportedly expected to spike.

    • Were These 3 Guantanamo Deaths Really Suicides?

      On June 9th, 2006, it is said that three prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp committed suicide in a coordinated effort. They all died using the exact same methods, in their cells, on that evening.

      However, when NCOs (non-commissioned officers) contradicted this account, cracks began to show in the official NCIS investigation. The NCOs revealed that these three prisoners were actually not in their cellblocks the night they died. Rather, they were taken to a secret CIA black spot nearby, dubbed ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘Camp No’. While they were returned to their cell at the time of death, more than 12 papers that contradicted the official report of that night were suppressed during an internal investigation.

    • Police Investigating Use of Scottish Airports by CIA “Rendition” Torture Flights

      Legal charity Reprieve has called on the Scottish Government to ensure that police investigating the use of Scottish airports by CIA ‘torture flights’ have access to a major US Senate report on the spy agency’s secret ‘rendition’ programme.

    • Onerous, irrational and unconstitutional

      Political. America is freeloading. Events belie the local panel’s assertion that the Philippines invited the United States as our guest, to use our former bases and facilities—rent-free—as counterweight to China. The Chinese became aggressive in the West Philippine Sea in 2012; the United States decreed its “pivot” to Asia much earlier. Clearly, America decided, unilaterally, to make the Philippines home to thousands of its soldiers, aircraft carriers, battleships and warplanes. And the Philippines followed America in a zombie-like stupor.

    • Once a U.S. asset, Gen. Hafter recruited Libya’s entire military command with Egypt’s backing

      Egypt has been deemed a leading supporter of this week’s mutiny within the Libyan military.

      Diplomatic sources said renegade Gen. Khalifa Hafter was receiving guidance and military support from Egypt.

    • WPost Seeks US-Patrolled ‘Safe Zone’ in Syria

      Neocons never blush at their own hypocrisies, demanding Russia respect international law and do nothing to protect eastern Ukrainians, while demanding President Obama ignore international law and create a rebel “safe zone” in Syria, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • The Real Financiers of Boko Haram–Exposed

      In other words, the incitement of North against South, Christians against Muslims, was recognised as the most potent strategy that could push Nigeria into sectarianism. In fact, that Boko Haram has extremist religious connotation is believed to be enough to keep Nigeria busy to think beyond its survival.

      So carefully managed, it is impossible to trace Boko Haram’s funding and arms supply sources; unless one has a privileged access to the CIA-led trillion dollar terror economy, which Loretta Napoleoni, in her book, ‘’Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Network,’’ argued is impossible for CIA’s unofficial funding sources include money laundering, terrorism, extrajudicial killings, drug trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, human trafficking, gambling and illegal arms and oil sales.

      Known not to leave anything to chance, the CIA ensured that it was in full control of both the mainstream and grassroots media in Nigeria. This was a smart move since it is a given that the one who controls what the people read, hear and watch invariably controls what the people think about and how they think.

      Thus, fully aware that press freedom actually belongs only to those who own the press, the CIA is secret marriage with some media owners and as a result has been successful at controlling and manipulating what gets to most Nigerians.

      Little wonder no one seems to wonder how the US Embassy (and by that the CIA) gets its intelligence, including the recent announcement it made that “As of late April, groups associated with terrorism allegedly planned to mount an unspecified attack against the Sheraton Hotel, in Nigeria.”

      The problem is that our government is not bold enough to demand their source of intelligence, and why rather than sharing such important intelligence with Nigeria, the US chose to make them public in the form of announcements.

    • ‘Over 60% drone targets homes in Pakistan’
    • The Drone Promise
    • PM unimpressed by protest outside his house

      Prime Minister John Key thought the candlelight vigil outside his house last night was “not really cricket”.

      About 30 protesters gathered outside his Auckland home last night in a candlelight vigil commemorating “the numerous deaths of civilians and the illegal killing of ‘supposed’ terrorists, including New Zealander Daryl Jones — killed by the US drone strike programme”.

    • PM: Don’t protest outside my home

      Prime Minister John Key has hit out at protesters who gathered at his home last night, to protest his position on deadly drone strikes.

      Last week Key said drone strikes were justified, but acknowledged innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire.

    • Australian drone deaths expose government indifference

      While the last couple of weeks have been taken up with thinking about the Budget and its disproportionate impact on poorer Australians, another, more spectacular, area of government disregard for the lives and rights of its citizens has gone relatively unremarked.

    • Most US Drone Strikes in Pakistan Attack Houses

      Domestic buildings have been hit by drone strikes more than any other type of target in the CIA’s 10-year campaign in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan, new research reveals.

      By way of contrast, since 2008, in neighbouring Afghanistan drone strikes on buildings have been banned in all but the most urgent situations, as part of measures to protect civilian lives. But a new investigative project by the Bureau, Forensic Architecture, a research unit based at London’s Goldsmiths University, and New York-based Situ Research, reveals that in Pakistan, domestic buildings continue to be the most frequent target of drone attacks.

    • Secret Cable Reveals Russia Warned US in 2008 Meddling in Ukraine Could Split Country

      A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Washington as far back as 2008 that US-EU-NATO meddling in Ukraine could split the country in two.

      “Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the Bucharest summit (ref A), Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat,” said the 2008 cable classified by William Burns, than US Ambassador to Moscow and currently the US Deputy Secretary of State.

    • This Leaked Diplomatic Cable From 2008 Foreshadowed Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

      A secret U.S. diplomatic cable written six years ago (and tweeted by Wikileaks on Tuesday) foreshadowed much of the tension between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine.

    • Donetsk crowds protest Ukrainian elections, besiege richest oligarch’s mansion
    • Wikileaks Released Cable Reveals Russia Warned US of Potential Split in Ukraine

      A secret cable released by Wikileaks on Tuesday revealed that Washington had been warned by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as early as 2008 that US-EU-NATO interfering in Ukraine would result in the country splitting in two.

    • China fumes over cyber theft charges, accuses US of hypocrisy

      Miffed with the US over indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers over commercial cyber espionage charges, China accused the US of hypocrisy and double standards.

      Chinese Defence Ministry posted a statement on its website, saying, “From ‘WikiLeaks’ to the ‘Snowden’ case, US hypocrisy and double standards regarding the issue of cyber-security have long been abundantly clear”.

      “The so-called ‘commercial espionage network’ is a pure fabrication by the US, a move to mislead the public based on ulterior motives,” the AFP quoted the statement.

    • Which 39 Democrats Want a War That Never Ends–and Voted Against Sunsetting the AUMF?

      During the defense appropriations amendment process, Adam Schiff (CA-28) proposed an amendment that would sunset the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) with the end of our combat role in Afghanistan, i.e. December 31, 2014.

    • Vladimir Putin hits back at Prince Charles

      The Russian president accuses the Prince of Wales of ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unroyal behaviour’

    • Drone Killing Memo Author Confirmed as Federal Judge

      Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Paul said, “I rise today in opposition to killing American citizens without trials. I rise today to oppose the nomination of anyone who would argue that the President has the power to kill American citizens not involved in combat.”

      “I rise today to say that there is no legal precedent for killing American citizens not directly involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a President is not worthy of being placed one step away from the Supreme Court,” the Kentucky senator said.

      On Wednesday, the Obama administration agreed to release to senators a redacted version of the document co-authored by Barron that provided the legal justification for the targeted drone killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

    • AP’s Fram Neglects to Mention ‘Filibuster’ or ‘Waterboarding’ in Covering Judicial Confirmation of Obama’s ‘Drone Memo’ Author

      Given that he was confirmed on a 53-45 vote, it is highly unlikely that Barron’s nomination would have survived had Senate majority leader Harry Reid not imposed the “nuclear option” last year to prevent senators from stopping a contentious nomination by requiring 60 senators to approve the idea of even having a confirmation vote. As for waterboarding, Barron’s nomination became controversial because he is, as Fram noted, the “architect of the Obama administration’s legal foundation for killing American terror suspects overseas with drones.” 53 Democratic senators are apparently okay with that, even though many if not most of them have gone apoplectic over the idea of waterboarding known terrorists of any nationality who may have knowledge of their fellow travelers’ plans.

    • The Three Laws of Pentagon Robotics

      1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
      2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
      3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

    • A Yemeni Man Is Suing British Telecom over America’s Deadly Drone Strikes

      A deep boom rocked through Sanaa, Yemen, the sound coming from outside of the city, perhaps from near the village of al-Masna’a.

    • Despite Obama’s new rules, no end in sight for drone war
    • Drone strike protest outside PM’s home
    • Candlelight Vigil to Be Held Outside John Keys House
    • Vigil planned outside Key’s home

      There will be a candlelight vigil outside Prime Minister John Key’s home in Auckland to highlight the issue of US drone strikes.

    • “Masters of Manipulation”: Psychopaths Rule The World

      Psychopaths are in love with power and risk taking, masters of manipulation, self-serving opportunism and self-aggrandizement, and hold doctorates in deceit and deception. Psychopaths are super intelligent charmers who are highly skilled at playing others in order to get what they want. They are keenly perceptive at reading people, understanding their motives and values, brilliant at learning their weaknesses and blind spots, and highly effective at inducing both sympathy and guilt in others.

    • The War on America’s Military Veterans, Waged with SWAT Teams, Surveillance and Neglect

      Just in time for Memorial Day, we’re once again being treated to a generous serving of praise and grandstanding by politicians and corporations eager to go on record as being supportive of our veterans.

      Patriotic platitudes aside, however, America has done a deplorable job of caring for her veterans. We erect monuments for those who die while serving in the military, yet for those who return home, there’s little honor to be found.

      The plight of veterans today is deplorable, with large numbers of them impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, thoughts of suicide, and marital stress, homeless (a third of all homeless Americans are veterans), subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration (VA) offices.

    • CIA ‘gave Beirut bomber refuge in return for secrets’

      AN IRANIAN terrorist responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans in the 1983 Beirut bombings was resettled in the United States by the CIA in return for divulging secrets about Tehran’s nuclear programme, a new book claims.

      Ali Reza Asgari is believed to have masterminded the attacks in April 1983 on the US embassy in the Lebanese capital, which killed 63 people, and another attack six months later on the marine barracks and the French barracks, in which 241 US servicemen and 58 French citizens died.

    • Ex-CIA analyst: U.S. regularly use death as criminal punishment

      An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar, consortiumnews.com reported.

    • America’s Death-Penalty Fellow Travelers

      An inconvenient truth about America’s use of capital punishment is that it puts the U.S. in company with unappealing authoritarian states, like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while creating a divide from modern democratic societies in Europe and the Americas, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Former Texas A&M President, CIA Director, Takes Over Boy Scouts of America

      Robert Gates, the new president of the Boy Scouts of America, says he has no problems with allowing openly gay adults in the organization, but won’t address changing their policy right now.

    • US report on Scots role in terror suspect transfer

      SCOTLAND’s role in the interrogation and alleged torture of terror suspects by the CIA could be laid bare by a recently declassified US intelligence report, it has been revealed.

      Police are currently investigating claims Scottish airports were used as a stop-off for “rendition” flights, which transferred prisoners to secret jails overseas.

    • Qatar Sentences Alleged Filipino Spy to Death

      The unknowing also includes Qatar that has sentenced a Filipino national to death for allegedly selling top secret Qatari military information to “Filipino state security forces” that the Qataris left unnamed.

    • The information wars

      The US government continues its efforts to clamp down on leaks of classified information.

    • Disability Pay of Ex-Cop, Now FBI Agent Probed

      A former police officer in Northern California is being investigated for collecting a disability pension while he is currently working for the FBI.

      Oakland city officials are looking into how former police officer Aaron McFarlane receives more than $52,000 in disability benefits from the city while he has been working as an FBI special agent in Boston.

    • Tsarnaev pal’s lawyer seeks to grill FBI agents

      Federal prosecutors have acknowledged that the two FBI agents and a Homeland Security Investigations agent questioning the youth at the state police barracks in North Darmouth knew a lawyer had called, but neither they nor the trooper who spoke with Griffin passed that information along to the students.

    • To Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley: We Need Accountability and Transparency for Local Law Enforcement!
    • The FBI Prospers by Feeding Fears

      James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.

    • The FBI prospers by feeding public safety fears

      James Comey became FBI director last year, at a time when Osama bin Laden was dead, terrorism at home was on the decline and the United States was shrinking its inflammatory presence in the Muslim world. So naturally, he says the danger is way worse than you think.

      Referring to al Qaeda groups in Africa and the Middle East, he recently told the New York Times, “I didn’t have anywhere near the appreciation I got after I came into this job just how virulent those affiliates had become. There are both many more than I appreciated, and they are stronger than I appreciated.”

    • The FBI hypes terrorism

      Terrorism has fed the FBI’s growth. Between 2001 and 2013, its budget nearly doubled after adjusting for inflation. But Comey was not pleased on arriving to learn that he would be inconvenienced by last year’s federal budget sequester.

    • God won’t save us: Memorial Day, honest history and our new military-industrial complex

      You had to take Johnson’s point. The question was, Why did Obama choose this man? As defense secretary, Gates oversaw an increase in troop strength in Afghanistan from 32,000 (when Obama took office and named him) to roughly 100,000 (before withdrawals began). Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting does the counting here. Why did Obama do that?

  • Transparency Reporting

    • ‘They think of WikiLeaks like Al-Qaeda’

      “They think of WikiLeaks like Al-Qaeda,” he said of the U.S. government. “I needed to move away from it all. I [still] talked to a few people on the computer but I generally completely disassociated myself with anything to do with Anonymous.”

    • Media Direct: towards better security for whistleblowers

      In essence, Media Direct seeks to enable encrypted interactions between anonymous whistleblowers, who access it via the Tor relay network, and specified journalists, with the submission server itself not logging anything, thus meaning it has no information to provide should it be targeted by the government of its host country (which remains secret, even from the administrators to the Media Direct site here in Australia). The site automatically deletes material that isn’t used within two weeks, and the keys whistleblowers use to access the server also have a limited lifespan. It’s close to plug-and-play for whistleblowers, as long as they can install Tor.

    • Chagossians: Wikileaked cable admissible after all
    • CIA won’t fake vaccinations, FBI still pursuing WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, latest on Benghazi: Spy Games Update

      The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are still actively pursuing a criminal investigation against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

    • Assange targeted by FBI probe, US court documents reveal

      WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange remains the subject of an active criminal investigation by the United States Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation, newly published court documents reveal.

      Papers released in US legal proceedings have revealed that a “criminal/national security investigation” by the US Department of Justice and FBI probe of WikiLeaks is “a multi-subject investigation” that is still “active and ongoing” more than four years after the anti-secrecy website began publishing secret US diplomatic and military documents.

      Confirmation that US prosecutors have not closed the book on WikiLeaks and Mr Assange comes as a consequence of litigation by the US Electronic Privacy Information Centre to enforce a freedom of information request for documents relating to the FBI’s WikiLeaks investigation.

    • Julian Assange’s father in Newcastle to receive award

      JOHN Shipton says he is not, by nature, the most outgoing of people.

      “I’m a private person; I’d prefer to be at home reading a book,” Mr Shipton said yesterday.

      But having WikiLeaks whistle-blower Julian Assange for a son means Mr Shipton’s life is no longer solely his own.

    • TOPICS: Truckers missing trick without cartoon mascot

      Assange will receive an International Award for Outstanding Service in the Defence of Human Rights and Global Justice. You know, one of those.

    • Afghan anger at mass US phone monitoring
    • Julian Assange Goes Where Glenn Greenwald Wouldn’t

      Though they’re often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald don’t always see eye to eye.

    • Julian Assange’s spy report knocks Glenn Greenwald down a peg

      A rift is forming in the world of leaked top-secret government documents. On one side is Glenn Greenwald, the founding editor of The Intercept online news site, who earlier this week reported that the U.S. government was recording practically every single cell phone call made to or from the Bahamas and another, unnamed country.

    • Will Julian Assange Be Moving to a Squatters’ Settlement In Brazil?

      On May 14, João Paulo Rodrigues, a leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The two men discussed ways in which Latin American social movements might help Wikileaks. Following their two-hour discussion, the leader told Assange, “If you need asylum in Brazil, we offer our land settlements.” Assange responded with a hug.

    • Wikileaks Founder Assange Endorses Bitcoin at South African Tech Conference

      Notorious whistleblower Julian Assange spoke glowingly about Bitcoin during a technology conference in South Africa on Wednesday, calling the currency “the most intellectually interesting development in the last two years.”

    • WikiLeaks: US eavesdrops on Kenyans’ calls

      A US intelligence agency is allegedly tapping all phone calls made in Kenya, possibly informing the recent travel advisories and the heightened alert at its Embassy in Nairobi.

    • Hacker who Targeted WikiLeaks is Going after Edward Snowden
    • Film About 1971 FBI Break-in Traces Path To Snowden And Wikileaks

      The film 1971, which just had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, documents the activities of “eight ordinary citizens,” but their story is far beyond the ordinary. On March 8, 1971, the group orchestrated a robbery at an FBI office in the Philadelphia suburb aptly called Media, making off with every file. Those hundreds of documents, mailed to the press leading to 50,000 more pages, laid bare the details and degree of government surveillance of the American people. Congressional hearings in subsequent years revealed that the FBI, under the autocratic leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated institutions from universities to community groups and even threatened the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The mere fact of the existence of residential FBI offices, in low-slung brick buildings along tree-lined, mostly residential streets, reflected the acceptance — and even deification of the agency in earlier decades. No member of the Media, Pa., group was ever caught or prosecuted for the break-in. They broke their long silence in the film and a new book by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Swansea traffic warden caught on camera refusing to give ticket to vehicle on double yellow lines ‘because that’s the boss’s car’

      As a man who has himself experienced wardens deciding, with their “discretion”, to give him a ticket in that very spot before, Steve McMillan perhaps understandably felt he could not just let it slide.

      Filming the whole incident on his mobile phone, he can be seen confronting a warden who initially says that it hasn’t yet “been five minutes”.

      But when Mr McMillan explains that it clearly has – and that he has this recorded on his phone – the unnamed warden quickly goes on the defensive.

    • Obama Administration Sued for Refusing to Disclose Data on Student Loan Debt Collectors

      President Barack Obama has taken several steps over the past few years to address the $1 trillion problem of student loan debt. He’s pushed loan forgiveness programs and efforts to help borrowers reduce payments. One thing that apparently isn’t factoring into his plans, though, is reining in abusive debt collectors that the Department of Education hires to collect student loans debt when people can’t pay.

      More than $94 billion of the nation’s student loan debt was in default as of September 2013, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office. And the percentage of people defaulting on school loans has increased steadily for six years in a row. In 2011, the Department of Education paid private debt collectors $1 billion to try to collect on that debt—a number that is expected to double by 2016. The tactics used by those debt collectors range from harassing to downright abusive. In March 2012, Bloomberg reported that three of the companies working for the Department of Education had settled federal or state charges that they’d engaged in abusive debt collection.

    • Fighting Poverty Wages

      We’re at a critical moment in our economic recovery that requires real leadership and people power to ensure true economic democracy in our country. There is incredible work being done to build a strong antipoverty movement, and spaces like these are fundamental to encourage an open dialogue about our strategies and tactics as well as our successes and failures.

      As corporate profits keep soaring, workers’ wages continue to stagnate, creating the widest income inequality gap our nation has seen in modern times. At Jobs With Justice we still believe that in America, people who work hard should be paid enough to live with dignity and raise a family. Today, millions of people go to work every day and still don’t earn enough money to feed their families. If people can work full-time and still can’t afford groceries, rent and medication, then the entire model is flawed and unfair. We can’t continue down this path of creating bottom-of-the-barrel, low-wage jobs that condemn our friends and neighbors to poverty.

    • Big Credit Suisse’s Sweetheart Deal

      Attorney General Eric Holder’s sweetheart settlement with Switzerland’s second largest bank, corporate criminal Credit Suisse, sent the wrong message to other corporate barons. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) says it well:

      “Nor does the plea deal hold any officers, directors or key executives individually accountable for wrongdoing, raising the question of whether it will sufficiently deter similar misconduct in the future.”

      Mr. Holder, of course, touted the deal as tough. Credit Suisse was fined a non-deductible $2.6 billion for their long, elaborate plan to provide tax evasion services for many thousands of wealthy Americans. The bank agreed to plead guilty of criminal wrongdoing – a rare demand on the usually coddled large financial institutions. In addition, Credit Suisse, in Mr. Holder’s words, failed “to retain key documents, allowed evidence to be lost or destroyed, and conducted a shamefully inadequate internal inquiry”… through a “conspiracy” that “spanned decades.”

    • What do Brazilians really think of their maids?

      An anonymous Twitter account is highlighting the poor treatment of maids in Brazil.

    • Even Iran Knows How To Fix The Corrupt Banker Problem

      Having watched Tim Geithner’s disgusting defense of the tax-payer-backed re-inflation of a corrupt and knowingly devastating banking system on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and watching the US fine (no jail time for anyone) a Swiss bank which admits its guilt over billions of fraud yet allow them to remain a prime dealer of US Treasuries; we thought the following story from a ’3rd world banking system’ would open a few eyes in the US this weekend as ‘we remember’. As AP reports, a billionaire businessman at the heart of a $2.6 billion state bank scam in Iran, the largest fraud case since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, was executed Saturday, state television reported.

    • We (and This Includes You, Democrats) Have Blown a Huge Hole in the Safety Net
    • Law Enforcement vs. the Hippies

      Maybe this is because lefties don’t complain enough. You may remember the hissy fit thrown by Fox News when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that the election of a black president might spur recruitment among right-wing extremist groups and “even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past.” As it turns out, that was a good call. But the specter of jack-booted Obama thugs smashing down the doors of earnest, heartland Republicans dominated the news cycle long enough for DHS to repudiate the report under pressure and eventually dissolve the team that had produced it.

      And the similar report about left-wing extremism that DHS had produced a few months earlier? You don’t remember that? I don’t suppose you would. That’s because it was barely noticed, let alone an object of complaint. And even if lefties had complained, I doubt that anyone would have taken it seriously. There’s just no equivalent of Fox News on the left when it comes to turning partisan grievances into mainstream news.

    • Housing crisis? No, just a very British sickness

      Housing booms are today’s medieval plagues. Boils suppurate on the political backside. People rush to find culprits to lynch. Quacks appear on street corners with fake remedies. Reason takes a holiday.

      Thus it was yesterday, as the Today programme’s John Humphrys chided David Cameron for the “housing crisis” and for not building more houses in the Tory shires. It was like curing famine by sending caviar to Africa.

      Meanwhile, everyone from Ed Miliband to the governor of the Bank of England screams crisis. There is a crisis when prices fall and a crisis when prices rise. Almost everywhere house prices are still bouncing along the bottom, but at London dinner parties they are a “bubble”.

    • How the IMF Destroyed Greece: The Reality of the Greek “Success story”: On Its Way to Become a Third World Country
    • As the Global Economy Continues to Crumble, Old Fascism Finds a New Voice

      Europe has a special worry about a broken, uncaring economy.

      Things rip apart. More and more people fall into desperation. Some of them decide it’s the fault of immigrants. Or homosexuals.

    • Unification of Europe’s Far Right: Rise of the Fourth Reich?

      The situation is not entirely comparable to that of Europe and Germany of the 1930s and 40s. Nevertheless, the rise of these far-right parties, their ties to the economic hardships and austerity measures imposed by the European Union, and the spread of nationalistic and xenophobic tendencies are alarming.

    • Jean-Marie Le Pen suggests Ebola as solution to global population explosion

      Virus ‘could sort out demographic explosion’ and by extension Europe’s ‘immigration problem’, says founder of Front National

  • Politics

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Report blasts “unscrupulous” U.S. surveillance in China

      In particular, it described China as a main target of the U.S. clandestine secret surveillance.

    • Afghanistan Hits Out at U.S. Spying Allegations

      Afghanistan on Sunday expressed anger at the United States for allegedly monitoring almost all the country’s telephone conversations after revelations by the Wikileaks website.

      Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said on Friday that Afghanistan was one of at least two countries where the U.S. National Security Agency “has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic [and international] phone calls.” Earlier last week journalist Glenn Greenwald had revealed that the NSA had been monitoring all the domestic and international phone calls of the Bahamas, but had refused to identify the second country, claiming he believed it could lead to the death of innocent people.

    • The world’s biggest internet spy is playing cop

      Since the US Department of Justice announced indictments against 5 Chinese military officers, some US media have reported that the US is conducting spying operations not confined to national security. The claims are based on secret documents leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

    • ‘USA Freedom Act’ and bipartisan tyranny
    • NSA reform falls short

      While a welcome first step toward reining in a government with “Big Brother” powers, the House bill falls short of the objective of its original sponsors. Transparency measures intended to guard against secret intrusions on personal privacy were weakened. And there are concerns about an undefined “specific selection term” to theoretically limit the reach of government intrusion into personal records and personal communications.

    • Jesse Kline: A bigger surveillance state won’t stop ‘cyberbullying’

      …making it easier for government officials to gather information about Canadians’ online activities.

    • Snowden In Russia Of His Own Free Will, Says Glenn Greenwald

      If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.If not, other countries are ready to offer him shelter, including Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and possibly even Germany or perhaps also Switzerland as there have been reports of the NSA spying on Swiss banks, he added.

    • Why US is in no position to accuse the Chinese of hacking
    • As Snowden gets his own comic book, the writer ‘leaks’ her inspiration and motivations

      FOUR years ago, Valerie D’Orazio was writing a story about a character who knows too much. Whom people want silenced. And who ultimately delivers all her files to the media, via email, so the whole world shall know these dark secrets. Little could D’Orazio have known then that this Marvel Comics story, titled Punisher MAX: Butterfly, was professional prologue to another big assignment: Writing about the life and exploits of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

    • Lawyer: Edward Snowden ‘Considering’ Return to US

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is “considering’ returning to the United States if certain conditions are met, his lawyer told Germany’s Der Spiegel.

      “There are negotiations,” Snowden’s German lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck said, according to a translation on RT.com, a news agency based in Russia. “Those who know the case are aware that an amicable agreement with the U.S. authorities will be most reasonable,” Kaleck said.

      Snowden is not involved in the negotations, Kaleck told Der Spiegel.

    • Snowden ‘considers’ returning to US – report
    • Congress divorces NIST and NSA

      The US Congress has passed a bill that removes the NSA’s direct input into encryption standards.

      According to a report at ProPublica, an amendment to the National Institute of Standards and Technology act removes the requirement that NIST consult with the NSA in setting new encryption standards.

    • Chinese Troops Must Take Up ‘Legal Arms’ Against ‘Pretentious’ U.S. (Huanqiu, China)

      The U.S. Department of Justice last week announced the criminal indictments of five Chinese army officers, claiming that they helped Chinese companies steal American corporate business information, and that all five are from “Unit 61398″ of the People’s Liberation Army. Since February last year, the U.S. government has accused the unit “headquartered in Shanghai” of being part of a “hacker army” involved in the long-term theft of U.S. trade secrets.

    • Scottish Nationalist Proposes Asylum For NSA Whistle-Blower Edward Snowden

      Scottish supporters of Edward Snowden say an independent Scotland should offer political asylum to the man whose disclosure of classified NSA documents revealed pervasive U.S. surveillance around the world.

      Members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs) have considered a call for the former NSA contractor, who is currently being sheltered in Russia, to be given political asylum in Scotland if voters opt for independence in September’s referendum.

    • China’s state-owned sector told to cut ties with US consulting firms

      China has told its state-owned enterprises to sever links with American consulting firms just days after the US charged five Chinese military officers with hacking US companies, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

      China’s action, which targets companies like McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), stems from fears the firms are providing trade secrets to the US government, the FT reported, citing unnamed sources close to senior Chinese leaders.

    • US-China cyber-battles intensify

      The United States has accused some Chinese of hacking into American companies’ computers but the US itself has been engaging in massive spying of foreign companies and trade officials.

      [...]

      But in fact the US does spy on companies and trade policy makers and negotiators of other countries, presumably in order to obtain a commercial advantage.

    • ‘USA Freedom Act’ and bipartisan tyranny
    • US tries to bar Chinese nationals from two hacker conferences in the US
    • Licence to spy

      In January, after the disclosures by Edward Snowden about the scale of the US intelligence apparatus’s cyber snooping capabilities, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to curtail the National Security Agency’s damaging practices and to begin a conversation on how a balance between national security and civil liberties could be struck. If it was clear then that downsizing the surveillance state would be a difficult task, the version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives last week underscored that fact.

    • German Lawmakers May Call Apple CEO Tim Cook Over NSA Spying

      An investigation committee set up by German parliamentarians to look into the NSA’s bulk collection of Europe’s telecommunications data may call several prominent U.S. tech company executives to testify, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, reports The Wall Street Journal. Other witnesses that the committee may call include Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Dick Costolo, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) executive vice

    • The Washington Post’s ‘Fear-Driven Approach’ to NSA Files Infuriated Snowden

      When National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden was working to convince journalists to cover NSA documents he taken with him to expose evidence of dragnet warrantless surveillance, he was especially frustrated with one media organization, which has actually received recognition for its work on the NSA files: The Washington Post.

      The story of how the Post became involved and, in many ways, let a whistleblower down is a testament to why future whistleblowers should be cautious when approaching such establishment media outlets. What happened is detailed in journalist Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA & the US Surveillance State.

    • The Bahamas Wants To Know The Reasons Of NSA Recording Its Phone Calls

      The Bahamas government officials want their US counterparts to explain why the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting and recording every cell phone call taking place on the island nation.

    • NBC’s Brian Williams Gets Exclusive with Edward Snowden

      NBC anchor Brian Williams has landed an exclusive interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It will be Snowden’s first American television interview. Williams traveled to Moscow this week to speak with both Snowden and Glenn Greenwald for an hour-long special that will air during primetime on May 28th.

    • US-China tech exchange strained over hacking accusations

      The U.S.’ escalating feud with China over hacking charges could end up hurting IT suppliers in both countries, as suspicions and eroding trust threaten to dampen the tech exchange between the two nations.

    • New York Times Admits Reason For Delay In Delivering NSA Wiretapping Story

      On the 2004 campaign trail, President Bush denied the existence of an American warrantless surveillance program. But inside the Department of Justice, an attorney leaked information to The New York Times explaining the National Security Agency did indeed eavesdrop on phones around the country.

    • New York Times: Spy bill falls short

      Unfortunately, the bill passed by the House on Thursday falls far short of those promises, and does not live up to its title, the USA Freedom Act. Because of last-minute pressure from a recalcitrant Obama administration, the bill contains loopholes that dilute the strong restrictions in an earlier version, potentially allowing the spy agencies to continue much of their phone-data collection.

    • NSA reform to be ‘fight of the summer’

      Civil libertarians who say the House didn’t go far enough to reform the National Security Agency are mounting a renewed effort in the Senate to shift momentum in their direction.

    • FBI introduces app to help protect children
    • The FBI’s Massive Facial Recognition Database: Privacy Implications
    • House Committee Puts NSA on Notice Over Encryption Standards

      An amendment adopted by a House committee would, if enacted, take a step toward removing the National Security Agency from the business of meddling with encryption standards that protect security on the Internet.

    • Will The House’s Gutted USA Freedom Act Really Stop The NSA?

      “While it represents a slight improvement from the status quo, it isn’t the reform bill that Americans deserve,” says a staff attorney with the ACLU.

    • Unhackable NSA-proof instant messaging program

      In the digital world, you never know who is spying on you. There’s hackers, nosy neighbors, a vengeful ex, the NSA, and that’s just a handful of the possibilities.

      Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to keep your messages safe from prying eyes? Now there is.

      Take a look at PQChat, an unhackable – yes, I said unhackable – secure instant messaging app.

    • CERN Scientists Launch Encrypted Email Service

      As it turns out, people really don’t want the government reading their email. Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have launched a new email service featuring end-to-end encryption to ensure complete privacy for users.

      Dubbed ProtonMail, the service claims to be fully anonymous. “Because of our end-to-end encryption, your data is already encrypted by the time it reaches our servers,” the site says. “We have no access to your messages, and since we cannot decrypt them, we cannot share them with third parties.”

      According to Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, the service was inspired by the revelations of the massive citizen surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency (NSA) made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year.

    • NSA row sparks rush for encrypted email

      A new push to encrypt email, keeping messages free from government snooping, is gaining momentum. One new email service promising “end-to-end” encryption launched last Friday, and others are being developed while major services such as Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail have stepped up security measures.

      A major catalyst for email encryption were revelations about widespread online surveillance in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor. “A lot of people were upset with those revelations, and that coalesced into this effort,” said Jason Stockman, a co-developer of ProtonMail, a new encrypted email service which launched last Friday with collaboration of scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN.

    • US considers denying visas to Chinese hackers to attend conferences
    • US accuses Chinese officials of cyber espionage

      Meanwhile, US is engaged in massive electronic surveillance

    • Read it, you’ll doubt no more

      In the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden found a perfect match. I don’t mean to slight the contributions of Laura Poitras and Barton Gellman, the other two journalists who first dug into Snowden’s amazing and unprecedented trove of National Security Agency (NSA) documents.

    • America: spying mostly on its own

      One characteristic of a totalitarian state is that it is as determined to subjugate its own citizens as it is to conquer foreigners. That’s why Edward Snowden could tell the National Press Club by live video link from his Russian exile that when he was a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) he was appalled to see NSA “collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia.”

    • Independent Scotland could give asylum to ‘traitor’ Edward Snowden

      HOLYROOD has triggered a major diplomatic row with the US over a proposal to grant asylum to the “traitor” Edward Snowden in the event of independence.

    • The Pressure’s On Harper to End Online Spying — Let’s Keep it Up

      Leading Conservative elder statesman Stockwell Day has joined the growing chorus of Canadians speaking out about how Bill C-13 would expose law-abiding Canadians to warrantless government spying. If passed, the controversial bill would grant immunity to telecom companies who hand our private information to the government without a warrant.

    • Commentary: U.S. cyber-scoundrelism doomed to backfire

      “Play by the rules” seems to be Washington’s sacrosanct motto on international interaction. But time and again rules are just a lump of clay in Uncle Sam’s hands.

      In a recent farce about cyber-security, the United States slapped some fabricated charges against five Chinese military officers, accusing them of hacking into the systems of U.S. companies to steal trade secrets.

    • Chinese indicted for acting like America’s NSA
    • What does GCHQ know about our devices that we don’t?
    • Police use cellphone spying device
    • The Pentagon report on Snowden’s ‘grave’ threat is gravely overblown

      NSA defenders still won’t tell the whole truth, but a newly revealed damage assessment offers a window into government damage control – not any actual damage done by Snowden

    • Edward Snowden Threw Crypto Parties Before He Blew the Whistle on NSAEdward Snowden Threw Crypto Parties Before He Blew the Whistle on NSA
    • A warning, not a blueprint – living in a post-Snowden world

      It is twenty five years since Tim Berners-Lee had the germ of an idea that became the World Wide Web. Smartphones for everyone have been with us less than a decade. Technology is transformative and world changing. 150 years ago we didn’t have the electric light or the phonograph. Photography was a new and rare technology, and everything we take for granted in our lives today – central heating, hot and cold running water, flushing toilets, fridges, cars, radio, and TV – had yet to be invented, or was at the very least out of the reach of the average citizen.

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • Tell Mozilla: Keep DRM out of Firefox

      Only a week after the International Day Against DRM, Mozilla has announced that it will support Digital Restrictions Management in its Firefox Browser. The browser will have a built-in utility that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Majority of Japanese public oppose compromising over TPP: Mainichi poll

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Supreme Court Admits Copyright Infringement May Actually Help The Copyright Holder
      • Pirates Are Staying In European Parliament

        As of 18:00 on Election Day, it is clear that the Pirate Party remains in the European Parliament for another term. The German exit polls predict that at least Julia Reda from Germany has just been elected as Member of European Parliament, securing a pirate seat for the coming term. More results as they come in (developing story).

      • THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE COPYRIGHT INDUSTRY AND THE NSA

        Most notably, the copyright industry is known for using child porn as an argument for introducing mass surveillance, so that the mass surveillance can be expanded in the next step to targeting people who share knowledge and culture in violation of that industry’s distribution monopolies. This is a case study in taking corporate cynicism to the next level.

        This mass surveillance is also what feeds the NSA, the GCHQ, and its other European counterparts (like the Swedish FRA). It is continuously argued, along the precise same lines, that so-called “metadata” – whom you’re calling, from where, for how long – is not sensitive and therefore not protected by privacy safeguards. This was the argument that the European Court of Justice struck down with the force of a sledgehammer, followed by about two metric tons of bricks: it’s more than a little private if you’re talking to a sex service for 19 minutes at 2am, or if you’re making a call to the suicide hotline from the top of a bridge. This is the kind of data that the spy services wanted to have logged, eagerly cheered on by the copyright industry.

      • Amazon Won’t Sell You The Paperback Version Of The Anti-Amazon Book

        The latest evidence: Amazon has escalated its battle against book publisher Hachette. Now Amazon won’t allow you to pre-order any Hachette books, the publisher confirmed to The Huffington Post on Friday. That means you cannot buy the paperback version of Brad Stone’s Amazon exposé “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”

      • Amazon Is Cracking Down on Book Publisher, Say Critics

        Amazon appears to be trying to pressure a book publisher into agreeing to more favorable terms for the online retail giant by refusing to offer pre-orders of some of the publisher’s titles. Books for which Amazon is no longer taking orders include a new novel by J.K. Rowling and the paperback version of “The Everything Store,” an inside look at the operations of Amazon.

      • Kim Dotcom Fails in Bid to Suppress FBI Evidence

        Kim Dotcom has lost his bid to have evidence held by the FBI against him kept a secret. The information , a 200-page document which includes a sampling of 22 million emails relevant to his extradition case, may now be made public. Efforts by Dotcom to gain access to government held documentation against him were also rejected.

      • Public BitTorrent Trackers Ban Piracy Monitoring Outfits

        The three largest BitTorrent trackers have banned the IP-ranges of several major hosting companies. The move aims to make it harder for anti-piracy outfits and other information gathering outfits to snoop on file-sharers. Unfortunately, the changes also mean that users of some VPNs, proxies and seedboxes can no longer connect.

      • Open WiFi Is Not a CopyCrime: EFF’s Primer on Open WiFi and Copyright

        Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities. Most of the time they don’t, and the world gets a valuable public service of simple, ubiquitous Internet access.

05.25.14

Don’t Count on Patent ‘Reforms’ in the US

Posted in Law, Patents at 5:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Roof

Summary: In patent law, just like in most other areas of law, ‘reforms’ achieve nothing except reinforce the status quo

BOGUS ‘reforms’ are common vehicles for ‘normalising’ what’s already in place; such is the case with the NSA ‘reform’ that has been branded “Freedom”. Newspeak triumphs again.

The ‘Freedom’ Act basically stamps (for approval) what was lumped on top of ‘Patriot’ Act in the same way that patent ‘reforms’ in the US (also named along the lines of “invent” or “innovation”) basically authorise patent trolling and do nothing to limit patent scope, which expanded over time.

Years ago we cited reports that Intellectual Ventures, the world’s largest patent troll (which is highly connected to Microsoft), spent millions lobbying the US government along with Bill Gates. They don’t want anything to change. Now we know that patent trolls continue getting their way in Congress because money — not logic — drives US policy. To quote a long new report: “Trial lawyers are heavy donors to Democratic politicians, including Reid. A Washington Post article on Reid’s fundraising during his 2010 campaign noted big-money fundraisers taking place at a Florida trial lawyer’s home, as well as one held in California by the top securities class-action law firm, now named Robins Geller Rudman & Dowd.”

Another report from the same site shows how hard it has become to challenge patent trolls in the US:

Judge: FindTheBest can’t use anti-extortion law against a patent troll

[...]

Last year, consumer search website FindTheBest tried to use an anti-extortion law to fight back against Lumen View Technology, a patent troll that attacked it with a “matchmaking” patent. While FindTheBest was able to knock out Lumen’s patent in short order, its lawsuit based on the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act came to an end this week.

The judge’s opinion recounts some of the facts that led up to the RICO case, such as Lumen’s attorney, Damian Wasserbauer, accusing FindTheBest CEO Kevin O’Connor of committing a “hate crime” for using the term “patent troll” against one of Lumen’s owners.

Basically, not only patent law is flawed in the US; it’s now expanding to copyright in the sense that APIs are deemed copyright-able. █

05.24.14

Links 24/5/2014: Many Games on GNU/Linux, Thai Coup

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • YouTube to acquire Twitch for more than $1 billion

    In March 2014 alone, Twitch was single handedly responsible for 1.35% of all downstream traffic in North America.

  • 9 Things That Didn’t Happen to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

    The evidence is mounting that a deliberate action by someone on board caused the diversion and disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. But over the past week and a half since the plane vanished, as contradictory information came in from various sources, people floated plenty of crazier ideas about the plane’s fate.

  • Security

    • EBAY… You keep using that word ‘ENCRYPTION’ – it does not mean what you think it means

      A day has passed since the online tat bazaar admitted its customer database was hacked back in February, and the method of encryption is still not known. We do what wasn’t encrypted: millions of people’s names, home addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers and email addresses, which were stored in the ransacked database alongside the passwords.

    • Researcher finds vulnerability in eBay and claims he uploaded a shell

      Jordan said in his tweet that he notified about the vulnerability to eBay. A screenshot published in his twitter account shows that he is able to upload a ‘shell.php’ file in the following location…

    • eBay Security Breach Delivers 10 Lessons for Enterprise IT Executives

      Another day, another company that has disclosed that one of its main databases has been hacked and user information has been compromised. So far eBay hasn’t divulged full details of the breach. Reportedly the attackers accessed about 145 million records. Now, the online auction company is urging its 128 million active users to change their passwords. The attackers were able to access everything from users’ full names and addresses to email addresses. But eBay asserts that the compromised database didn’t contain financial information, which the company encrypts anyway. The company also said PayPal users weren’t impacted. The breach, which is just the latest in a long list of security issues that have affected large enterprises with large customer bases, should teach us a lot about security, or the general lack of it, across the Web. The massive Target breach in December showed what can happen when huge databases containing customer information are breached and the data stolen. Reports about eBay demonstrate, once again, how even a huge Internet business, which should know how to defend itself against sophisticated cyber-attacks, can be compromised. This eWEEK slide show highlights what we can learn from this latest attack.

    • eBay Breach Isn’t Just About Passwords
    • EPFL researchers crack unassailable encryption algorithm in two hours

      A protocol based on “discrete logarithms”, deemed as one of the candidates for the Internet’s future security systems, was decrypted by EPFL researchers. Allegedly tamper-proof, it could only stand up to the school machines’ decryption attempts for two hours.

    • Duo Security Review

      Traditional password authentication has long been recognised as the weak link in the security chain, even before the Heartbleed vulnerability exposed the private keys of millions of servers worldwide. A password the user can easily remember is rarely a good password, while a good password is rarely easy to remember.

    • DARPA IS WEAPONIZING VIRTUAL REALITY FOR CYBER WAR

      Andy Greenberg has an online article in this morning’s (May 23, 2014) Wired.com, with the title above. Mr. Greenberg writes that, “for the past two years, DARPA has been working to make waging cyber war — as easy as playing a video game.” “On Wednesday,” he notes, “DARPA showed off its latest demos for Plan X, a long-standing software platform designed to unify digital attack and defense tools into a single, easy-to-use interface for American military hackers. And for the last few months: that program has had a new toy. The agency is experimenting with using Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — to give cyber warriors a new way to visualize three-dimensional network simulations — in some cases with the goal of better targeting for them to attack.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Anna Politkovskaya killing: five men convicted of murder

      The defendants were three Chechen brothers, one of whom was accused of shooting Politkovskaya in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building on 7 October 2006, as well as their uncle and a former police officer.

    • New Zealand, Australian governments complicit in US drone attacks

      In a New Zealand television interview last week, American investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill said in that the National Party government is “extremely aware” of US drone attacks, including one which killed NZ citizen Daryl Jones (also known as Muslim bin John) in Yemen last year. Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, who was in Auckland at a writers’ festival, also implicated the Australian government.

    • A Year On, What’s Changed (And What Hasn’t) On Drone Oversight
    • Most US drone strikes in Pakistan attack houses
    • Why Have US Drones Targeted So Many Houses in Pakistan?
    • Why Have US Drones Targeted So Many Houses in Pakistan?
    • E-cigarette ban among bills governor signs

      Gov. Terry Branstad signed 11 bills into law Friday, including a ban the sale of electronic cigarettes and alternative nicotine products to minors in Iowa and a separate measure designed to create parameters for the use of drones, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles.

    • Experts debate ‘killer robots’
    • Despite Obama’s new rules, no end in sight for drone war
    • Obama has put Pakistan drone war on hold

      A year ago, President Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University in Washington in which he made the case that it was time to wind down the “boundless global war on terror ” and “perpetual wartime footing” that has been a feature of American life since 9/11.

      Indeed, the CIA drone program in Pakistan has stopped completely since the beginning of this year. This is a noteworthy development given the fact that there have been 370 drone strikes in Pakistan over the past decade that have killed somewhere between 2,080 to 3,428 people; most of whom were suspected militants, but also a smaller number of civilians.

    • Judge Napolitano: Obama’s Drones Killed More Girls than Boko Haram Kidnapped

      During a discussion on President Obama sending troops into Chad to help the search for the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, Fox’s Judge Andrew Napolitano told Shepard Smith that American drone strikes have done more damage than the terrorist organization.

    • The year of living more dangerously: Obama’s drone speech was a sham

      Twelve months ago today, Barack Obama gave a landmark national security speech in which he frankly acknowledged that the United States had at least in some cases compromised its values in the years since 9/11 – and offered his vision of a US national security policy more directly in line with “the freedoms and ideals that we defend.” It was widely praised as “a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America”.

      Addressing an audience at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, the president pledged greater transparency about targeted killings, rededicated himself to closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and urged Congress to refine and ultimately repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which has been invoked to justify everything from military detention to drones strikes.

    • UK’s new Reaper drones remain grounded, months before Afghan withdrawal

      Five new Reaper drones announced by David Cameron in December 2010 to support British troops in Afghanistan are still not yet in operation, the Bureau can reveal.

      The new drones were bought as an urgent purchase and were part of a £135m package intended to effectively double the size of the UK’s fleet of armed drones in Afghanistan, and its surveillance capacity. But more than three years after the purchase was announced, and with just months to go before the UK’s troops are due to leave the conflict, the additional Reapers are yet to take to the skies.

    • Protests Against US Drone War Planned at West Point

      Anti-war protesters displaying model drones and photos of known victims of the US military and secret CIA targeted assignation program will greet family and friends of the graduates as they enter West Point gates at 7 am. The protest will extend to 9:30 am; graduation ceremonies begin at 10:00 am.

      The protest has special meaning for those in the US Army because the MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, a more deadly version of the infamous Predator drone, is being integrated into use in every Army division.

    • Drone strikes on U.S. citizens defy justification

      That President Obama, formerly a professor of constitutional law, and David J. Barron, “one of the memo’s authors” and an Obama nominee to a federal appeals court judgeship, could conceive of even a shred of justification for such crimes boggles the mind.

    • Tell Congress And President Obama: No Money For More War

      President Obama gave an eloquent speech on May 23, 2013 on the issues of endless war, US drone strikes, Guantanamo, and the 12-year old AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force). Compare his words then with the reality one year later.

      “For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, helping to explode our debts and constraining our ability to nation-build here at home.”Reality? The “direct” cost of our Iraq & Afghan wars is over $1.5 trillion, and the Administration wants a $79 billion blank check for fighting undefined wars in FY 2015. (That’s on top of a “basic” Pentagon budget of $495 billion).

      “…there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility (Guantanamo) that should never have been opened.” Reality? There were 166 prisoners at Guantanamo a year ago, 154 now. Most of them have been formally cleared for release, and most of the rest have not been formally charged. Hunger strikes there are on-going. Efforts to secure the release of US Army POW Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for Afghan Guantanamo prisoners have not succeeded.

    • US drone promises – One year on

      A year after President Obama laid out new conditions for drone attacks around the world, US forces are failing to comply fully with the rules he set for them.

    • Commentary: The Government Isn’t Very Good at Deciding What to Keep Secret
    • Old CIA links return to haunt Libya’s Haftar

      Libya’s renegade General Khalifa Haftar is leading a military campaign against the country’s Islamist-led government and militants; however, his past life in America and old ties to the CIA are likely to be a stumbling block on his road to power.

      Following his botched February coup attempt –when he appeared on television announcing the dissolution of the government only to be scoffed at by the-then Prime Minister Ali Zeidan as “ridiculous” – launched this week “Operation Dignity” to rid Libya of “terrorists” and “corrupt” officials.

    • Khalifa Haftar: renegade general causing upheaval in Libya

      Commander has managed to rally influential bodies in offensive against post-Gaddafi government but is dogged by old CIA link

    • The CIA’s Bay of Pigs Documents Can Be Kept Secret Indefinitely, Court Rules

      The American public might never get to know the entire history of the events that occurred during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, not at least until the Central Intelligence Agency is finished revising the draft copy of its history, which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

    • U.S. Court of Appeals Joins the CIA’s Cover-Up of its Bay of Pigs Disaster

      The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday joined the CIA’s cover-up of its Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 by ruling that a 30-year-old volume of the CIA’s draft “official history” could be withheld from the public under the “deliberative process” privilege, even though four of the five volumes have previously been released with no harm either to national security or any government deliberation.

    • Why is Glenn Greenwald Protecting the CIA?

      Every day across the planet the CIA instigates the arrest, torture and murder of people whose only wrongdoing is opposing the crimes being committed by those in league with Pax Americana. Arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, all of the most evil activities on this planet are being instigated and directed by the CIA. So why is Glenn Greenwald protecting these bastards?

    • The CIA Coordinates Nazis and Jihadists

      The confrontation between the Kiev putschists, backed by NATO and Ukrainian federalists, supported by Russia, has reached a point of no return.

    • Senators Feinstein and Levin on 9/11 Case Delay, RDI Declassification

      Made available today: a letter from Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, which was sent to President Obama in January of this year and urged him to speed things up in the 9/11 case—chiefly by declassifying additional information regarding the CIA’s long-since-discontinued program of rendition, detention and interrogation.

    • CIA secrecy over detention program threatens 9/11 prosecutions, senators warned Obama
    • U.S. Covert Intervention in Chile: Planning to Block Allende Began Long before September 1970 Election

      Covert U.S. planning to block the democratic election of Salvador Allende in Chile began weeks before his September 4, 1970, victory, according to just declassified minutes of an August 19, 1970, meeting of the high-level interagency committee known as the Special Review Group, chaired by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. “Kissinger asked that the plan be as precise as possible and include what orders would be given September 5, to whom, and in what way,” as the summary recorded Kissinger’s instructions to CIA Director Richard Helms. “Kissinger said we should present to the President an action plan to prevent [the Chilean Congress from ratifying] an Allende victory…and noted that the President may decide to move even if we do not recommend it.” – See more at: http://hnn.us/article/155768#sthash.svf3Lrin.dpuf

    • What Really Happened in Chile

      The CIA, the Coup Against Allende, and the Rise of Pinochet

    • Thailand army chief confirms military coup and suspends constitution
    • A Military Coup in Thailand

      In fact, that’s why America’s Founding Fathers opposed a standing army for the United States. It’s also why President Eisenhower warned the American people about the dangers that the military-industrial complex pose to America’s democratic processes. It’s also why President Truman, thirty days after the Kennedy assassination, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post that talked about the sinister nature of the CIA.

    • A Former Congressman Is Making Explosive Allegations After Allegedly Being Told the ‘Ground Truth’ About Benghazi by Source

      West also said he was told the attackers were with Ansar al-Sharia and government officials are being threatened with their pensions being cut if they speak out about Benghazi.

      As far as why U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi at the time, West claims he was informed that there was a “covert weapons scheme going on in Libya, Benghazi.”

      “We had been supplying radical Islamists with weapons against Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, effectively supplying the enemy and destabilizing that country,” he added.

      “And it seems that there was a CIA weapons buy-back program, the aim of which was to ship the retrieved weapons out of Libya through Turkey, and to the Islamist forces in Syria.”

      West apparently believes in his source enough to allege Benghazi will “make Iran-Contra look like Romper Room.” However, due to the unanswered questions about the source, it’s impossible to verify the claims at this time.

    • Elias Groll: How much economic espionage is too much?

      Those were the words not of an aggressive Chinese spy, but none other than Stansfield Turner, the Carter-era CIA director, who in 1992 argued that the United States should more aggressively carry out intelligence operations aimed at securing America’s leading economic position in the world.

      If it weren’t for matters of patriotism, the former CIA director probably wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at allegations of Chinese spying unveiled by a Pennsylvania grand jury and the Department of Justice this week.

      Indeed, the tactics the Obama administration has accused China of using have also been debated at the highest levels of the U.S. government as possible instruments of American power. Other countries  have carried out operations similar to those the Pennsylvania grand jury have accused Chinese spies of carrying out.

    • Robert Gates: Most Countries Conduct Economic Espionage

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Whistleblowers deserve full coverage

      Of course, thanks to Wikileaks this even­ing, we now know the coun­try that Glenn Gre­en­wald redac­ted from his ori­ginal report was Afghanistan.

      Why on earth should the Afgh­anis not be allowed to know the sheer scale of sur­veil­lance they live under? In fact, would many be sur­prised? This is an excel­lent related art­icle, do read.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • At least 21 dead in Vietnam anti-China protests over oil rig

      At least 21 people were killed and nearly 100 injured in Vietnam on Thursday during violent protests against China in one of the deadliest confrontations between the two neighbours since 1979.

      Crowds set fire to industrial parks and factories, hunted down Chinese workers and attacked police during the riots, which have spread from the south to the central part of the country following the start of the protests on Tuesday.

      The violence has been sparked by the dispute concerning China stationing an oil rig in an area of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam. The two nations have been fighting out a maritime battle over sovereignty and that battle has now seemingly come ashore.

    • Green party support is surging – but the media prefer to talk about Ukip
    • This Ice Sheet Will Unleash a Global Superstorm Sandy That Never Ends

      Glaciologist Richard Alley explains that losing West Antarctica would produce 10 feet of sea level rise in coming centuries. That’s comparable to the flooding from Sandy—but permanent.

    • Why Do So Many Books About Africa Have the Same Cover Design?
    • Meet Jess Spear, the Socialist Climate Scientist Running for the State House

      Sawant and Spear are buddies because she left her scientific research to help run Sawant’s victorious Socialist Alternative campaign for City Council last year. She also spent much of that time as Organizing Director of the $15 Now campaign, which is somehow magically about to pass just a year after it began, to the collective bewilderment of the rest of the United States.

    • Climate Change As a Weapon of Mass Destruction

      Who could forget? At the time, in the fall of 2002, there was such a drumbeat of “information” from top figures in the Bush administration about the secret Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and so endanger the United States. And who—other than a few suckers—could have doubted that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to get a nuclear weapon? The only question, as our vice president suggested on “Meet the Press,” was: Would it take one year or five? And he wasn’t alone in his fears, since there was plenty of proof of what was going on. For starters, there were those “specially designed aluminum tubes” that the Iraqi autocrat had ordered as components for centrifuges to enrich uranium in his thriving nuclear weapons program. Reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon hit the front page of the New York Times with that story on September 8, 2002.

    • Landmark sites in the US at risk from climate change – in pictures

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Labour Party has tanked in the English council elections

      Labour played the game of negative expectations in a massive way, claiming a net gain of 150 seats would be a victory for them. So far they have a net gain of just 82. But the extraordinary thing is that the BBC have, throughout the Breakfast News period – the largest TV news watch of the day – been unable to add up all the council seats yet. Sky has totaled every single one of the council seats declared overnight, while the BBC has been able to total under half – and the BBC has come up with a Labour net gain of 102. This has enabled the BBC to show a three figure Labour gain on its strapline all morning, and lead every news bulletin: “Major gains for UKIP in English local elections. Labour has also made gains. A poor night for the Conservatives and Lib Dems”.

    • BBC New Labour Orgasm

      The BBC are way behind in their totalizing, and cherry picking the Labour gains. The BBC have consistently been showing about 7% of all seats contested as Labour gains. Sky consistently shows under 3% of all seats contested as Labor gains.

    • First Amendment for Whom? Press Fights for Access to Scott Walker John Doe Docs

      The public may be on the cusp of learning more about the two “John Doe” investigations into Scott Walker, his associates, and groups that spent millions to get him elected.

      On May 21, the Wisconsin judge in the now-closed 2010-2013 “John Doe I” investigation into Walker’s County Executive during his 2010 run for governor ordered the release of all records gathered in the probe that pertain to county business. That probe resulted in six convictions for Walker aides and associates, including for political fundraising on the taxpayer’s dime. Now, the decision about what records to release rests with Walker’s successor as County Executive, Chris Abele.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • LG Will Take The ‘Smart’ Out Of Your Smart TV If You Don’t Agree To Share Your Viewing And Search Data With Third Parties

      LG certainly feels it has the right to do this. In fact, it makes no secret of this in its long Privacy Policy — a document that spends more time discussing the lack thereof, rather than privacy itself. The opening paragraph makes this perfectly clear.

      [...]

      LG seems very concerned that Smart TV owners won’t allow it to provide them with “relevant ads.” This focus on advertising might give one the impression that a Smart TV is subsidized by ad sales, rather than paid for completely by the end user.

      When LG was caught sending plaintext data on files stored on customers’ USB devices, it amended its policies and data collection tactics to exclude this data. This happened not on the strength of a customer complaint (in fact, LG told the customer to take it up with the store that sold him the TV) but because the UK government announced its intention to dig into LG’s practices and see if they conformed with the Data Protection Act.

    • DNI James Clapper Says US Intel Community About to Experience Technological Revolution With New Satellites and Advanced Sensors

      COLORADO SPRINGS: The intelligence community is on the verge of “revolutionary” technical advances. Spy satellites and other systems will be able to watch a place or a person for long periods of time and warn intelligence analysts and operatives when target changes its behavior. Satellites and their sensors could be redirected automatically to ensure nothing is missed.

    • NSA surveillance reform bill passes House by 303 votes to 121

      The first legislation aimed specifically at curbing US surveillance abuses revealed by Edward Snowden passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a majority of both Republicans and Democrats.

      But last-minute efforts by intelligence community loyalists to weaken key language in the USA Freedom Act led to a larger-than-expected rebellion by members of Congress, with the measure passing by 303 votes to 121.

    • No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald – review
    • A Response to Michael Kinsley

      Do I need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifully obeisant to the U.S. government? Did they not just resolve that debate for me? What better evidence can that argument find than multiple influential American journalists standing up and cheering while a fellow journalist is given space in The New York Times to argue that those who publish information against the government’s wishes are not only acting immorally but criminally?

    • Assange names country targeted by NSA’s MYSTIC mass phone tapping program

      The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been recording and storing nearly all domestic and international phone calls from Afghanistan, according to Wikileaks’ front man Julian Assange.

      Wikileaks revealed the name of the country after The Intercept reported Monday that the NSA was actively recording and archiving “virtually every” cellphone call in the Bahamas and one other country under a program called SOMALGET. The Intercept said it did not name the second country because of concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.

    • WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA

      The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country “X”.

    • With or Without WikiLeaks’ NSA Revelation, Violence Reigns in Afghanistan
    • WikiLeaks names ‘entire’ nation under NSA gaze
    • WikiLeaks Claims NSA Is Recording ‘Nearly All’ of Afghanistan’s Phone Calls
    • New NYT editor spiked NSA spying story

      Mostly lost in the past week’s media gossip around NYT executive editor Jill Abramson’s ouster, and Dean Baquet’s promotion to her role: Baquet is the former LA Times editor who killed the biggest NSA leak pre-Edward Snowden.

    • How the NSA may have tapped Merkel’s phone

      The seven-page secret report by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), seen by Bild newspaper, discusses five possible ways the NSA could have gained access to Merkel’s phone. The story caused outrage in Germany when it came to light in October last year.

    • ​NSA spies on OSCE HQ in Vienna – report
    • NSA Spying In Austria Beyond Unacceptable: Analyst

      The National Security Agency [NSA] has reportedly gained direct access to the fiber optic network linking Vienna, Austria to the Internet, and has been spying on the roughly 17,000 diplomats stationed in the Austrian capital city, where several important international organizations are headquartered, including the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the International Atomic Energy Agency and Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
      Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/us/news/2014_05_24/NSA-Spying-In-Austria-Beyond-Unacceptable-Analyst-9767/

    • Another Former NSA Lawyer Says He Wouldn’t Have Listened To Concerns About The Agency’s Surveillance Programs

      Frontline’s expansive report on the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks (United States of Secrets) has uncovered some rather amazing stuff about the agency’s mindset. The post-9/11 decision to deflect every question or concern with conjecture about how “thousands of lives” will be lost if its programs are rolled back or altered in any way continues to this day — rehashed in every government hearing and set of talking points since the leaks began.

      “Live in fear” is the motto. Every question about domestic surveillance is greeted with nods to its legality and assertions that even acknowledging known facts about the NSA’s programs gives our nation’s enemies the upper hand.

    • Pentagon report: scope of intelligence compromised by Snowden ‘staggering’
    • China responds to NSA tampering with network gear vetting process

      The US government used security concerns to essentially drive Chinese companies out of the American networking marketplace. Now China is doing the same thing, as the Chinese government is planning to require all products sold in the country to pass a “cyber security vetting process,” the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported.

    • The NSA wins again. You lose
    • Who Leaked NSA Documents to WikiLeaks?

      Julian Assange’s whistle-blowing group announced plans to publish an NSA report that allegedly could get people killed. The question is: How did they get the documents?

    • NSA panel invites US tech chiefs as witnesses
    • Germany wants Zuckerberg to testify in NSA case – report

      Members of the German parliamentary commission, which is investigating the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) questionable activity, want the heads of US high-tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google, to testify to the Bundestag, writes Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

      In March, the German parliament’s lower house voted to investigate the NSA’s operations in Germany. According to the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA monitored the telephone conversations of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other members of the German political and economic elite.

    • How the NSA Can Get Onto Your Computer

      But as The New York Times and others reported earlier this year, there is a suite of programs, codenamed QUANTUM, which allows the NSA access to a much wider variety of computers.

    • Letter: Americans should be furious over the extent of NSA spying

      Over the past two weeks, I watched the two-part PBS “Frontline” investigation broadcast locally on WNED titled, “The United States of Secrets.” This was an engrossing yet chilling report on the secret NSA spy program that encompasses the intrusions into the privacy of all U.S. citizens as well as foreign entities. This is the program that began after 9/11 under President George W. Bush and has been expanded upon under President Obama.

      I found myself becoming very angry while watching this program, perhaps more for the fact that both presidents continue to mislead and even lie to the American public about the scope of the spying rather than the actual privacy intrusion itself. Yes, many people will say: “Oh, it doesn’t affect me. I have nothing to hide.” But this country was built upon the Constitution and our rights are being trampled under the guise of security from terrorism. Major U.S. Internet and communications providers are cooperating with the NSA in granting access to our emails, phone calls, messages, Skype calls and even our financial transactions.

      I think the thing that may disturb me the most is the silence over this issue from the American public. In my opinion, Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower and should be applauded for his disclosures rather than ostracized and condemned as a criminal. Wake up, America, before it’s too late.

    • Irony alert: Google labels NSA data centre a ‘backup service’

      Irony alert! Google Maps has labelled the now infamous NSA data centre in Utah a “hard drive backup service.”

      While not technically inaccurate, it’s also hardly descriptive.

      The NSA’s data centre in Utah is the focal point of many of the surveillance operations brought to light by the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. It was popularized after an article in Wired Magazine last year profiled its construction and purpose. It includes four 25,000-square-foot buildings just to hold servers. It has its own power plant and substation. Security is intense and nobody gets close to it without proper clearance.

    • With the NSA Reform Bill, Privacy Is Not on the Menu
    • House of Representatives passes ‘gutted’ NSA surveillance reform
    • House Members Join Hands to Pass ‘Weak’ NSA Reform
    • Feinstein: ‘Open’ to Considering House NSA Reform Bill

      Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said she is willing to consider the surveillance reform bill passed by the House on Thursday, which would end the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection of phone records.

    • Glenn Greenwald: U.S. Corporate Media is “Neutered, Impotent and Obsolete”

      In the final part of our extended interview, Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media’s response to his reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency documents. “We knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories … that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, ‘This doesn’t actually seem like journalism anymore,’ because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do,” Greenwald says. “It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government.”

    • We need to know why DHS is an NSA intelligence “customer”, and what that means

      One of the results of the endless propagation of this myth was the creation of so-called “intelligence fusion centers” throughout the United States, initially funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Now sustained by state and local governments, with occasional aid from DHS, fusion centers are staffed by representatives from federal, local, and state agencies, as well as members of private industry. They have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars over the last ten years, but even though they were set up as anti-terrorism intelligence offices, none has thus far produced any useful information about terrorism.

    • Peter Watts on the Harms of Surveillance

      This is interesting. People accept government surveillance out of fear: fear of the terrorists, fear of the criminals. If Watts is right, then there’s a conflict of fears. Because terrorists and criminals — kidnappers, child pornographers, drug dealers, whatever — is more evocative than the nebulous fear of being stalked, it wins.

    • Edward Snowden is giving his first American TV interview on May 28th

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Open Source Chief at Redhat Hit With Bogus Copyright Claims

        Bogus copyright claims on YouTube are getting more and more prevalent, but they only get exposure when they do damage to high-profile targets. Michael Tiemann is the Chief of Open Source Affairs at Redhat Inc. and apparently he can’t use Creative Commons music in his uploads without being bombarded with copyright claims.

      • Red Square, Moscow
        “Why I’m Voting Pirate” – A Testimony From An Ex-Soviet

        This testimony – “Why I’m Voting Pirate” – was published by Leila Borg, a person who grew up in the Soviet Union but moved to Sweden after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It has been translated to English and reposted here for a wider audience.

The ‘New Microsoft’ Nonsense is Not Dead Yet

Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 7:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft: Cracking, racketeering, and corruption of officials

Satya Ballmer
Satya Ballmer

Summary: The delusion of Microsoft as “open” or “law-abiding” still being promoted in the press, often by those who are paid by Microsoft

MICROSOFT is not a reformed company. Under Satya’s supposed ‘leadership’ there is still patent extortion (see recent examples) and Microsoft is attacking ODF, an international standard, after the British government selected it (basically not requiring all British citizens to become customers of Microsoft and proprietary spyware users). Based on this inquiry from Glyn Moody (British journalist), Microsoft lobbyists or some proxy of Microsoft like BSA are almost definitely still working hard to intercept pro-standards policies, not just FOSS policies. Watch what Moody writes:

Readers with good memories may recall that back in 2012, I put in a Freedom of Information request to the Cabinet Office regarding an astonishing U-turn it had performed on the matter of open standards. To my surprise, I received back a treasure trove of emails documenting Microsoft’s intense – and evidently successful – lobbying against the move to openness.

[...]

As you can see, that was nearly a month ago, and I have still not received the full reply, which means that the Cabinet Office is now really late. And that, in its turn, probably means that there is obviously something very interesting regarding open standards and Microsoft, which the Cabinet Office is reluctant to let me see. Time for another email reminding them of their legal obligations, I think….

It is rather telling, is it not?

Despite all this, amid the latest openwashing by Microsoft, there are so-called journalists (working as Microsoft-funded analysts, but we shall refrain from naming this one person or his employer) who say that Microsoft “Suspicion [is] Waning”, adding the usual Satya-washing of Microsoft (making it look like the company has changed under new public-facing leadership). The journalist says: “Though there typically is no shortage of pushback against Microsoft when it makes open source moves, the skepticism and suspicion seem to be giving way to technicality and practicality, both within and outside of Microsoft. By continuing to promote openness, integration and true collaboration with other vendors and technologies, including open source, Microsoft is doing its part to ensure its place in key trends such as cloud computing and devops” (just buzzwords, no substance there).

This is complete and utter hogwash. There has been nothing more dangerous than Microsoft entryism and increased influence in bodies like the Linux Foundation, which evidently learned no lessons from Nokia. They take Microsoft’s money and the outcome is self-evident.

People who try to sell us the idea that Microsoft is now better (or ethical) just don’t pay attention to facts. Microsoft is actively attacking everything FOSS, standards, and GNU/Linux. Selective attention or selective reporting is the tool of propagandists. These people are part of the problem and it’s hardly shocking that some of them (almost all of them) are paid by Microsoft. █

Latest Back Door in Microsoft Windows Open For Over Half a Year, OEMs Increasingly Preload GNU/Linux

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Internet Explorer facilitates remote search by spooks and non-government crackers

Internet Explorer

Summary: Another remotely-exploitable hole in Windows and more reasons for OEMs to choose GNU/Linux (e.g. Chrome OS) for new computers

ANTI-FOSS pundits like to distract. They are using OpenSSL to accuse FOSS as a whole of insecurity, based on just one bug. There are examples of this even in the past week’s news. It’s disproportional. Rarely do these pundits allude to Microsoft’s back doors for the NSA, which turn out to even include this remotely-accessible back door:

Microsoft has failed to address a remotely exploitable security flaw affecting the most widely used version of Internet Explorer.

This has been known about since last year. This is worse than negligent; it may actually be deliberate.

China recently banned Vista 8 in government. This is going to inspire other nations sooner rather than later. Some say that Microsoft is likely to not only alienate nations but also OEMs. One Microsoft booster, Gavin Clarke, believes that Microsoft has just distanced itself from PC makers “because Microsoft actually sees the Surface Pro 3 as a laptop killer.” To quote his piece:

It’s a marketing and a business decision that can only cause more damage to Microsoft’s relationships with PC and channel partners on Windows 8, and to its broader mission of encouraging uptake of its latest PC operating system.

One sure thing is, Microsoft is losing its dominance on the desktop, partly due to other form factors but also because of GNU/Linux (Chrome OS) on laptops. Many OEMs are now marketing and selling with great success so-called “Chromebooks”. It’s hard to ignore this trend at the local stores. █

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