Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

04.17.15

Links 17/4/2015: Wipro and the Netherlands Want FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 5:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opening Up Performance with OpenSpeedShop an Open Source Profiler

    Performance analysis to optimize HPC applications is challenging at many levels, not the least of which is the availability of adequate performance analysis and measurement tools. Underappreciated at best, most organizations rely on vendor-supplied tools included as part of a machine procurement. While generally good for analysis on a single node, such performance analysis tools typically do not provide the capabilities needed to analyze heterogeneous systems containing accelerators and/or distributed applications running across large numbers of nodes. As a result, most programmers are stuck having to guess at performance issues. The patchwork nature and lack of consistency amongst performance tools available across various HPC centers also means that many programmers lack proficiency in using the performance tool(s) provided at a new site or installed on a new machine.

  • Veyron Danger & Brain Motherboards Now In Coreboot

    As a quick update to the initial Veyron motherboards being added to Coreboot, Google has now added more Veyron boards to mainline Coreboot.

  • At Birth, Open Source Was About Saving Money, Not Sharing Code

    A similar line of reasoning predates Raymond’s rise to prominence, and even the introduction of Linux. As far back as the early 1980s, Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and the man some authorities have called the “last true hacker,” declared that the source code of software should be freely shared because “the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.”

    So, from an early date, advocates of open source development argued that open code is essential for two reasons: First, it’s simply a superior way to program; and second, there’s a moral imperative to share.

    That all sounds grand. And it’s certainly true that both the functional and moral dimensions of open code are key motivations for many open source programmers today.

  • When to choose closed or open source

    Catalyst IT founder Don Christie says one argument in favour of open source is that coding isn’t difficult.

    Most of the time that means others can quickly replicate closed software. He says: “They are going to replicate it anyway. It can be better to make it open source and get the benefits of better code.”

  • AT&T Makes Case for Open Source Sharing

    In a blog post this week and in an interview with Light Reading, Rice says there are several reasons being an active contributor is beneficial. But he admits with a laugh that AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) doesn’t have the same methods to make money on open source as software vendors, who can release a “free” version of their open source software for customers but then sell upgrades or back-end support.

  • Six things that make open source a no-brainer for your company

    So, you’re about to start a new company and you want to make open-source software the driving force behind all technology decisions. Outside of it being an incredibly noble and honorable cause, what are the key data points you need to fully understand before implementing this strategy?

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome 42 Brings The Push API & Extras

        Google today announced the Chrome/Chromium 42 web-browser reaching the stable channel and with it comes many improvements.

      • Chrome 43 Beta Brings Web MIDI & Permissions API

        Today’s Chrome 43 Beta release brings Web MIDI support for connecting to MIDI devices like synthesizers, DJ decks, and drum machines from the web browser. Aside from supporting the Web MIDI API, thre’s also now a Permissions API to let developers query permissions for Geolocation, Push, Notification, and Web MIDI APIs.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Pepperdata Nabs $15 Million to Scale its Enterprise Hadoop Biz

      This week, immediately following startup company AtScale coming out of stealth mode to show its tools for making data stored in Hadoop’s file system accessible within Business Intelligence (BI) applications, Think Big launched its Dashboard Engine for Hadoop, designed to make it easy for business users to cull insights from Hadoop data stores. And now, Pepperdata, which develops Hadoop cluster optimization software, announced that it has secured more than $15 million in strategic and venture financing to scale to serve enterprises who rely on Hadoop in production.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 4.5 Bumped To Become LibreOffice 5.0

      While we’ve been looking forward to the new features of LibreOffice 4.5 as the leading open-source office suite, version 4.5 is no more. The next version of LO is now going to be LibreOffice 5.0.

      To some surprise, this morning in Git, the version was bumped to 5.0 (5.0.0.0.alpha0+). There was no branching of LibreOffice 4.5 as it seems LibreOffice 4.5 is itself being renamed to LibreOffice 5.0.

  • CMS

    • How and why BackBee CMS went open source

      Our Parisian web agency and software company, Lp Digital, is open sourcing its content management system, BackBee CMS. In this article, I’ll explain the tools that helped us release BackBee as open source software and measure the results.

    • govCMS to release its own Drupal distribution

      The government’s govCMS project will make its own Drupal distribution publicly available for download, it announced today.

      The distribution will be a fork of the aGov distribution, which was developed by local development shop PreviousNext and is the building block for govCMS sites.

      aGov was released in 2013 after a beta period involving a number of federal and state government agencies. High profile end users include the NSW government’s ‘one stop shop’ for services, Service NSW.

  • Education

    • Higher Education Sees The Light

      This will also pave the way for other FLOSS like GNU/Linux on the desktop instead of That Other OS. Altogether this could save half the cost of desktop IT or permit more/better IT for the same money in Hungarian universities. What about your local university? This is yet another indication that this is the Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop. Hungary as a whole is not doing badly on GNU/Linux desktops (1.48%). It’s time the universities pulled their share up.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Chef aims to create the secret recipe for DevOps success

        Released at the beginning of the month, Chef Delivery is already getting some purchase in the fast growing DevOps market with the help of some blue-chip IT companies like HP. With Chef Delivery, the company says it “has captured success patterns of its most innovative customers and distilled them into a product”.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hurd 0.6 Released

      The GNU Hurd, the free open source replacement for the Unix kernel, has a new release that is still not suitable for production environments. There are also new releases of GNU Mach and GNU Mig, both of which have reached version 1.5.

    • Latest TPP leak shows systemic threat to software freedom

      Key congressional leaders have just agreed on a deal to fast track the fast-tracking of TPP. While the threat of TPP has persisted for years, now is the time to fight back!

    • GNU Hurd 0.6 Released Brings Clean-Ups & Fixes

      Version 0.6 of GNU Hurd was released today. Before getting too excited about GNU Hurd, it’s still bound to x86 32-bit and doesn’t offer any compelling new features.

  • Project Releases

    • Wine Announcement

      The Wine development release 1.7.41 is now available.

      What’s new in this release (see below for details):
      - More Known Folders supported in the shell.
      - Some more support for kernel job objects.
      - More MSI patches improvements.
      - Some theming fixes.
      - Various bug fixes.

    • Wine 1.7.41 Officially Released, Fixes an Adobe Photoshop CS6 Crash

      Alexandre Julliard announced the immediate availability for download and testing of a new maintenance release of Wine 1.7.41, which brings better support for kernel job objects, improves MSI patches, enhanced support for Known Folders in the shell, and fixes theming issues.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Would You Open-Source Your Body?

      As you may have noticed, this column is pretty keen on opening things up – whether that’s open source, open access or open government. But what about open-sourcing your body – releasing as open data the most intimate aspects of your physical existence? That’s what the Open Humans Network is asking.

    • Apple’s ResearchKit, npm private modules, and more open source news
    • This Week in Linux News: New Linux-GoPro Drone, Linux 4.0, and More

    • Open Hardware

      • Expanding access to open source hardware

        I didn’t pay anything for the USB keyboard and USB optical mouse that I use with this tiny computer, because they were donated to the public library where I work. Two weeks ago someone dropped of 10 new USB keyboards and 10 new USB mice; they were surplus from a computer upgrade cycle at a nearby office. To be sure, the value of the $35 USD Raspberry Pi 2 computer is extended when free USB keyboards and mice are available. There is a role, then, for schools, libraries, and makerspaces to collect these donated items in order to redistribute them to those who need them.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • ODF Plus Ten Years

      So what’s new? Well, basically one thing: we now have a related standard for formulas in ODF spreadsheets! This is something that obviously occurred 5-10 years too late, but better late than never. The Wikipedia article on OpenFormula is a fairly amusing example of the need to justify and rationalize mistakes that seems to surround the OpenDocument standard.

Leftovers

  • Nigel Farage On BBC Election Debate Is A Good Example Of How Not To Treat An Audience
  • Who won BBC leaders debate according to the data?

    Nicola Sturgeon was ahead of the Labour leader by 7 points in the question of who had the best personality: 30% of the liked her over Nigel Farage (23%), Ed Miliband (21%) and the Leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood (16%).

  • Science

    • TechCrunch Speaker Combines Every Possible Startup Cliche

      Change the world. Power. Influence. Innovation. Hand gestures. Literal self-comparisons to royalty. Slides. Rosenstein’s keynote at this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference has it all. There’s a banal, pseudo-do-gooder theme (“Do great things”). There are several venn diagrams. There are repeated tone deaf calls to “have your cake and eat it too,” an exhortation for all techies to embrace their Stanford dropout privilege and remake the world as they desire.

  • Hardware

    • ARM Dives into Low-Power IoT Communications

      ARM, the leading designer of mobile processors, announced the launch of ARM Cordio, a portfolio of low-power wireless communications technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT).

      ARM Cordio is comprised of the intellectual property (IP) from two acquisitions, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, also announced on April 16. The terms of the deals were not disclosed.

      The Cordio name originates from Sunrise Micro Devices’ sub-volt Bluetooth wireless radio technology. A year ago, Sunrise Micro Devices and Wicentric, a maker of Bluetooth Smart software, announced an alliance to develop software for the Cordio BT4 radio core for IoT sensors and devices.

    • Moore’s Law turns 50: What’s next for this tale of incredible shrinking chips

      When you’re strapping on the latest smart watch or ogling an iPhone, you probably aren’t thinking of Moore’s Law, which for 50 years has been used as a blueprint to make computers smaller, cheaper and faster.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Why Is WalMart Mysteriously Shuttering Stores Nationwide For “Plumbing Issues”?

      Earlier this year, WalMart became one of several corporate heavyweights to lift wages for its meagerly compensated workers, around 500,000 of which are now set to receive at least $9/hour and $10/hour by Q1 2016 (that of course assumes they make it on $9 an hour for another 12 months and don’t seek out other employment by sheer necessity).

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Yes, militaries are working on drone swarms

      That the battlefield of tomorrow will be abuzz with death is clear. Say hi to America’s drone cannons.

    • LOCUST: Autonomous, Swarming UAVs Fly into the Future

      A new era in autonomy and unmanned systems for naval operations is on the horizon, as officials at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced April 14 recent technology demonstrations of swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – part of the Low-Cost UAV Swarming Technology (LOCUST) program.

    • ‘Price tag’ settler argues in court that revenge isn’t a crime

      Were people’s lives and livelihoods not at stake, it would have been an almost sublime piece of parody. During the trial of four teenage Israeli settlers who set fire to a Palestinian-owned cafe in the West Bank town of Dura, which concluded on Monday, the defendants’ attorneys – as reported by Ynet – brought forth the claim that because the arson was an act of revenge, their clients were not guilty of breaking the law.

    • Lockheed Hopes Talk of Iran Getting S-300 Will Sell More F-35 Planes

      Earlier this week, Russia announced it was ending its five year ban on selling S-300 defensive missiles to Iran. There’s no indication yet Iran is even going to buy any, but Israel was immediately furious, predicting doom and gloom over the possibility.

    • Saudi Coalition Preventing Food Ships From Reaching Yemen

      One of the first measures taken by Saudi Arabia, when announcing its war against Yemen, was a full-scale naval blockade. For a nation that imports over 90% of its food, that was a devastating move, and one Saudi officials assured wouldn’t keep the food out of the country.

    • The Killing Initiative

      The world of private defence contractors, the modern version of the fabled Condottiere without the flags and the city-state veneration, received a blow with the handing down of stiff sentences on four former Blackwater operatives. Last year, the four in question, part of Blackwater’s Support Team Raven 23, were convicted in the Washington, D.C. federal court for killing 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour square in 2007.

    • Religious Fanaticism is a Huge Factor in Americans’ Support for Israel

      Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide. It’s the ultimate violation of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warning that “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded. … The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.”

    • Kill > Capture

      The Obama administration’s explicit policy is to capture suspected terrorists, not drone them. So why is there so much droning and so little capturing?

    • Father of Blackwater Victim: ‘Too Late’ for Apologies

      More than seven years after his nine-year-old son, Ali, was killed by contractors working for the American security firm Blackwater Worldwide, Mohammed Kinani says he’s finished his mission “to push these people to the law.”

      Four former Blackwater employees were given long sentences yesterday for killing 14 unarmed Iraqis, including Kinani’s son, and wounding many others, when in 2007 they shot at a crowd in Baghdad’s Nisour Square with machine guns and grenade launchers.

    • John Kerry Thanks Russia for Rescuing US Citizens From Yemen Air Strikes

      The US Secretary of State expressed appreciation for Russia’s action in evacuating Americans from Yemen, after the United States refused to engage in evacuation efforts for its citizens.

    • The Lies Still Killing Gulf War Vets

      Some cover-ups are scandalous. Others, like those surrounding the First Gulf War, suggest an official callousness that shocks and awes.

      During and immediately after the war, 200,000 of 700,000 U.S. troops were exposed to nerve gas and other chemical agents. The Department of Defense (DOD), fully aware of the chemical hazards and the troop exposure, deployed a litany of lies. After this, it concocted a cover-up. That cover-up continues to this day.

      Don Riegle, the senator who presided over Senate committee hearings in 1993-1994 about the veterans’ illnesses, recently told me: “Every effort was made for years to hide the truth and deny the medical research needed to fully treat the U.S. troops suffering from Gulf War Syndrome.”

    • NY Times (Again) Carries Water for Government’s Post Hoc Drone Assassination Justifications

      American Anwar al-Awlaki has been dead for over four years now, but The New York Times is still giving substantial ink to the U.S. government’s self-serving meme that Awlaki was an “operational” terrorist,” even though we still don’t know whether ISIS or AQAP is responsible for the recent attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

      I called out New York Times reporter Scott Shane for carrying the government’s water by pimping the “Awlaki was operational” narrative last year. Yesterday, Shane penned another lengthy article rehashing the U.S. government’s post hoc justification for targeting and assassinating Awlaki without due process.

    • Blackwater’s Legacy Goes Beyond Public View

      By the time four former Blackwater security guards were sentenced this week to long prison terms for the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 civilians in Iraq, the man who sent the contractors there had long since moved on from the country and the company he made notorious.

      Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, a former member of the Navy SEALs and heir to a Michigan auto parts fortune, has spent the last few years searching for new missions, new fields of fire and new customers.

      He has worked in Abu Dhabi and now focuses his efforts on Africa, with ties to the Chinese government, which is eager for access to some of the continent’s natural resources. Mr. Prince’s current firm, Frontier Services Group, provides what it describes as “expeditionary logistics” for mining, oil and natural gas operations in Africa, and has the backing of Citic Group, a large state-owned Chinese investment company.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Saudi Oil Production Hits All Time High, Surges By ‘Half A Bakken’

      As hopeful US investors buy everything oil-related on the back of a lower than expected crude build this week (after the biggest build in 30 years the week before), The Kingdom has stepped up overnight and ruined the dream of supply-restrained price recovery as it announced a surge in production output in March to yet another record high. The nation boosted crude output by 658,800 barrels a day in March to an average of 10.294 million a day, which as Bloomberg notes, is about half the daily production from the Bakken formation. WTI Crude prices have slipped by around 2% from yesterday’s NYMEX Close ramp highs as it appears Saudi Arabia is not willing to just let this effort to squeeze Shale stall.

    • As Drought Grips California, Networks Come Up Dry on Climate Science

      California is in its fourth year of an unprecedented drought, with no end in sight and water reserves dwindling. It’s exactly the type of scenario climate scientists have warned about, and new research sees global warming’s fingerprints on the drought. But a new FAIR study shows that, rather than investigating this connection, network news is largely ignoring it.

  • Finance and Politics

    • Politicians Bragging About Exports While Ignoring Imports? That’s Just Gross

      That probably should have been the headline of a Politico article (sorry, behind paywall) on a letter signed by 13 former Democratic governors urging Congress to approve fast-track trade authority to facilitate the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP). The most newsworthy aspect of the letter is that the governors apparently do not understand the basic economics of trade.

    • Debate: Hillary Clinton Sounds Populist Tone, But Are Progressives Ready to Back Her in 2016?

      Former secretary of state, senator and first lady Hillary Clinton has formally entered the 2016 race for the White House in a second bid to become the first woman U.S. president. We host a roundtable discussion with four guests: Joe Conason, editor-in-chief of The National Memo, co-editor of The Investigative Fund, and author of “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton”; Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer at The Nation; longtime journalist Robert Scheer, editor of Truthdig.com and author of many books; and Kshama Sawant, a Socialist city councilmember in Seattle and member of Socialist Alternative, a nationwide organization of social and economic justice activists.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street backers: We get it

      It’s “just politics,” said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried-interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008.

      “The question is not going to be whether or not hedge fund managers or CEOs make too much money,” said a separate Clinton supporter who manages a hedge fund. “The question is, how do you solve the problem of inequality. Nobody takes it like she is going after them personally.”

      Indeed, many of the financial-sector donors supporting her just-declared presidential campaign say they’ve been expecting all along the moment when Clinton would start calling out hedge fund managers and decrying executive pay — right down to the complaints from critics that such arguments are rich coming from someone who recently made north of $200,000 per speech and who has been close to Wall Street since her days representing it as a senator from New York.

    • Sanders: American people ‘don’t know’ what Hillary is running on

      “Why don’t you tell me what Hillary Clinton is campaigning on, do you know?” he said on MSNBC’s “Live with Thomas Roberts,” when asked if he believed her campaign message that she’s running to represent the “little guy.”

    • [Old] Kshama Sawant: The Most Dangerous Woman in America

      Kshama Sawant, the socialist on the City Council, is up for re-election this year. Since joining the council in January of 2014 she has helped push through a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 an hour in Seattle. She has expanded funding for social services and blocked, along with housing advocates, an attempt by the Seattle Housing Authority to allow a rent increase of up to 400 percent. She has successfully lobbied for city money to support tent encampments and is fighting for an excise tax on millionaires. And for this she has become the bête noire of the Establishment, especially the Democratic Party.

    • Jeb Bush’s Administration Steered Florida Pension Money to George W. Bush’s Fundraisers

      Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. “I’ve been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street.

      “The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting.”

      As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.

    • Severing ties with foundation won’t insulate Clinton from controversy

      Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she’s stepping down from her family foundation’s board of directors while running for president was well received, but that won’t shield her from the roiling controversy over the foundation’s acceptance of tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments.

      The boards of the Clinton Foundation and the affiliated Clinton Health Access Initiative are scheduled to meet this week to consider additional actions as a result of her candidacy, possibly including new curbs on foreign donations.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • An Article by Any Other Name May Smell Sweeter to Search Engines

      Among the bottomfeeders of the Internet ecosystem are “news scrapers”–websites that automatically harvest posts from actual news sites and repackage them in hopes of snagging some search engine hits and the accompanying online ad revenue.

    • Agency Overseeing Obama Trade Deals Filled With Former Trade Lobbyists

      The Office of the United States Trade Representative, the agency responsible for negotiating two massive upcoming trade deals, is being led by former lobbyists for corporations that stand to benefit from the deals, according to disclosure forms obtained by The Intercept.

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposed free trade accord between the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim countries; the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a similar agreement between the U.S. and the E.U.

    • NBC’s Conduct in Engel Kidnapping Story is More Troubling than the Brian Williams Scandal

      Throughout 2012, numerous American factions were pushing for U.S. intervention in Syria to bring down the regime of Bashar Assad, who throughout the War on Terror had helped the U.S. in all sorts of ways, including torturing people for them. But by then, Assad was viewed mostly as an ally of Iran, and deposing him would weaken Tehran, the overarching regional strategy of the U.S. and its allies. The prevailing narrative was thus created that those fighting against Assad were “moderate” and even pro-western groups, with the leading one dubbed “the Free Syrian Army.”

      Whether to intervene in Syria in alliance with or on behalf of the “Free Syrian Army” was a major debate in the west through the end of that year. Then-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry was openly discussing ways for the U.S. to aid the rebels to bring about regime change. Senator Joe Lieberman was saying: “I hope the international community and the U.S. will provide assistance to the Syrian Free Army in the various ways we can.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while ruling out direct military intervention, said: “[W]e have to redouble our efforts outside of the United Nations with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people’s right to have a better future.”

    • NBC’s Richard Engel Re-Reporting His Kidnapping In Syria Following Questions Over Captors’ Identity

      NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel is re-reporting a key detail of his December 2012 kidnapping in Syria after new information surfaced suggesting he may have been misled about the identities of his captors, according to sources familiar with the matter.

    • They Have ‘Propaganda,’ US Has ‘Public Diplomacy’–and a Servile Private Sector

      But wait a second–isn’t Voice of America itself a propaganda outlet? Not in the New York Times stylebook, apparently. The piece, by Ron Nixon, describes VOA as “the government agency that is charged with presenting America’s viewpoint to the world.” Later on, the Times refers to what it calls “America’s public diplomacy.”

      The US’s enemies, on the other hand, have “sophisticated propaganda machines that have expanded the influence of countries like China and Russia and terrorist groups like the Islamic State.” The difference between “propaganda machines” and “public diplomacy” is never explained in the article, but the former appears to be what “they” do while the latter is what “we” do.

      The only source quoted in the article who’s not directly connected to the government is Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, described as “a Washington think tank.” (“We are getting our butts kicked…. Countries like Russia are running circles around us,” Howard says.) Not mentioned is the fact that Jamestown was founded with the help of then-CIA Director William Casey to provide financial support for the Agency’s spies (Washington Post, 1/10/05).

  • Censorship

    • Copyright claims asserted in viral video of cop shooting fleeing suspect

      The April 4 viral video of a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing suspect has cost the cop his job and his freedom. But there’s now another cost attached to the video, perhaps in the $10,000 range or more. A publicist for the man who captured the footage—which led to homicide charges against North Charleston officer Michael Slager— says news outlets must pay a licensing fee to carry the footage.

      Australian publicist Max Markson, the chief executive of celebrity management firm Markson Sparks, told The New York Times that “I think that the people who might be put off by this are the media outlets that had it for free. Now they will have to pay.” Markson did not respond to Ars’ requests for comment.

  • Privacy

    • Open Rights Group files amicus brief in Hungarian data retention case

      Open Rights Group, Privacy International and a group of internationally acknowledged experts have filed amicus curiae briefs with the Hungarian Constitutional Court. The case has been brought by the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) against two major service providers, in an attempt to force the Hungarian Constitutional Court to repeal the Hungarian Electronic Communications Act.

    • NSA and FBI fight to retain spy powers as surveillance law nears expiration

      With about 45 days remaining before a major post-9/11 surveillance authorization expires, representatives of the National Security Agency and the FBI are taking to Capitol Hill to convince legislators to preserve their sweeping spy powers.

    • Booz Allen Wolves Offer Advice on Protecting NSA Henhouse

      The report dutifully examines how hard it is for the federal government to hire and keep top cybersecurity talent when the private sector pays so much more.

      Its very sensible recommendations include modernizing the creaky civil service hiring system and making compensation more competitive.

      But in a eye-popping bit of irony — even by Washington standards — the report was written by Booz Allen Hamilton, the giant “Beltway Bandit” government contractor known for regularly raiding the National Security Agency and other government organizations for its best and brightest cyber talents, especially after they’ve gotten valuable government training and security clearances.

    • Yes voters ‘right to suspect MI5 of spying on them’

      WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange believes SNP supporters were not being “paranoid” that their communications were being spied on during the independence referendum.

      Speaking via videolink at the Commonwealth Law Conference in Glasgow on Wednesday, Mr Assange said the “full capacities” of the British intelligence services were deployed during in the run-up to last year’s vote.

    • Assange: Yes Campaign “not paranoid” to think they were spied on during referendum

      The Australian expert in espionage believes independence amounted to a “national security threat” to the UK, justifying the mobilisation of the “full capacities” of the British state’s surveillance network.

    • Assange to discuss spying and privacy at key Glasgow conference

      In a rare public appearance, the Wikileaks founder, who has spent the past 34 months in the building after claiming asylum, will discuss how intelligence gathering abuses privacy in the internet age.

    • Suspicious lawyer finds malware on external hard drive supplied by police lawyer in discovery

      An Arkansas lawyer is seeking sanctions after his computer expert found malware on an external hard drive supplied in response to a discovery request.

      Lawyer Matthew Campbell of North Little Rock says he became suspicious when he received the hard drive by Federal Express in June 2014 from a lawyer for the Fort Smith Police Department, the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports. Previous evidence in the police whistleblower case had been provided by email or a cloud-based Internet storage service, or had been shipped through the U.S. Postal Service.

      “I thought, ‘I’m not plugging that into my computer,’ ” Campbell told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “Something didn’t add up in the way they approached it, so I sent it to my software guy first.”

      The technology expert found four Trojans on the hard drive. “These Trojans were designed to steal passwords, install malicious software and give someone else command and control of the infected computer,” Campbell says in a brief supporting his motion for sanctions (PDF).

      The security expert said in an affidavit that the Trojans were in a subfolder rather than the root directory, indicating they were “more likely placed in that folder intentionally with the goal of taking command of Mr. Campbell’s computer while also stealing passwords to his account.”

    • Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops

      An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials.

    • This simple game shows why metadata laws won’t protect whistleblowers

      Australia has passed data retention laws that force telecommunications companies to retain some types of phone and web metadata. This data can be requested by government agencies and has been used to investigate leaks of government information to journalists.

      It now takes a warrant to access a journalist’s metadata to identify a source, but this offers limited protection. Government agencies can still seek data from suspected sources without a warrant. This game shows how a whistleblower can still be identified.

    • Classified Department: We Unveil the New Unit of the German Domestic Secret Service to Extend Internet Surveillance

      The German domestic secret service is setting up a new department to improve and extend its internet surveillance capabilities, investing several million Euros. We hereby publish the secret description for the new unit named „Extended Specialist Support Internet“. More than 75 spies are designated to monitor online chats and Facebook, create movement patterns and social network graphs and covertly „collect hidden information.“

    • Hassanshahi Bids to Undermine the DEA Dragnet … and All Dragnets

      Often forgotten in the new reporting on the DEA dragnet is the story of Shantia Hassanshahi, the Iranian-American accused of sanctions violations who was first IDed using the DEA dragnet. That’s a shame, because his case may present real problems not just for the allegedly defunct DEA dragnet, but for the theory behind dragnets generally.

      As I laid out in December, as Hassanshahi tried to understand the provenance of his arrest, the story the Homeland Security affiant gave about the database(s) he used to discover Hassanshahi’s ties to Iran in the case changed materially, so Hassanshahi challenged the use of the database and everything derivative of it. The government, which had not yet explained what the database was, asked Judge Rudolph Contreras to assume the database was not constitutional, but to upheld its use and the derivative evidence anyway, which he did. At the same time, however, Contreras required the government to submit an explanation of what the database was, which was subsequently unsealed in January.

    • Unacceptable Surveillance of French Citizens soon to be Adopted!

      The examination of French Intelligence Bill ended this Thursday at the National Assembly. After 4 days of debate, very few enhancements were made to a text that was denounced by an incredibly large number of groups for its dangerous, intrusive and liberty-infringing nature and whose control dispositions are totally inadequate. La Quadrature du Net calls on French representatives to listen to the citizens’ demands to reject this text during the final vote on 5 May.

    • Getting out of Facebook like trying to escape from Alcatraz

      Last week, Facebook was forced to admit that it tracked the online activity of people who do not even have an account with the social network, which is a pretty egregious violation of most people’s assumptions of online privacy. After all, the people who are not on Facebook in 2015 have most likely made a very explicit decision not to be on Facebook.

      The admission came in response to a report commissioned by the Belgian data protection authority, which found Facebook in breach of European data privacy laws, but the social networking giant claimed the tracking only happened because of a bug that is now being fixed, while disputing many of the details of the report.

    • TV Companies Will Sue VPN Providers “In Days”

      A pair of Internet providers who defied TV company demands to switch off their VPN services will be sued in the coming days. CallPlus and Bypass Network Services face legal action from media giants including Sky and TVNZ for allowing their customers to use a VPN to buy geo-restricted content.

    • Surveillance in the General Election Manifestos

      Nearly all of the main parties at this General Election have now published their manifestos. Where do the parties’ manifestos stand on surveillance?

    • New Zealand Spy Data Shared With Bangladeshi Human Rights Abusers

      Secret documents reveal New Zealand’s electronic eavesdropping agency shared intelligence with state security agents in Bangladesh, despite authorities in the South Asian nation being implicated in torture, extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses.

      Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, has conducted spying operations in Bangladesh over the past decade, according to the documents. The surveillance has been carried out in support of the U.S. government’s global counterterrorism strategy, primarily from a spy post in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and apparently facilitated by the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Public Interest to Protect Powerful Paedophiles

      The Director of Public Prosecutions has decided that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute serial paedophile Greville Janner, for many years the leader of the Zionist lobby in the UK. I presume that his convenient senility is the reason for non-prosecution.

      But the facts of Janner’s activities in Leicester care homes have been known for decades, and there was overwhelming evidence in one particular case. The failure of the state to act against Janner when he was a Labour MP and Chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, is another example of the disgraceful impunity of the powerful in this country. In a pattern that has become familiar to us, police investigating the case were in 1989 warned off by their superiors.

    • Lord Janner will not face trial over abuse claims

      CPS says evidence against Labour peer would have warranted trial but the severity of his dementia means he is not fit to take part in any proceedings

    • DPP Labour Lord Janner Should Have Been Prosecuted on 22 Counts

      The Jewish institutions in the UK are acting precisely like the Catholic Church of twenty years ago on this issue. Where is the openness? Where is the angst? Where is the admission? Above all, where is the apology?

    • Werritty’s Chum Matthew Gould Took Janner to Kindergarten

      Adam Werritty’s friend and long term contact, the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, accompanied Greville Janner to visit a kindergarten in Israel in 2012, which was named in Janner’s honour. I wonder if the government of Israel will now change the name?

    • The FBI Informant Who Mounted a Sting Operation Against the FBI

      Torres isn’t an all-American guy. He’s an FBI informant, one of more than 15,000 domestic spies who make up the largest surveillance network ever created in the United States. During J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations, the bureau had just 1,500 informants. The drug war brought that number up to about 6,000. After 9/11, the bureau recruited so many new informants — many of them crooks and convicts, desperate for money or leniency on previous crimes — that the government had to develop software to help agents track their spies.

    • Government May Now Tell You Why You’re On ‘No Fly’ List, But Not Always

      Since the “no fly” list was formalized in 2001, the only way to know if the U.S. government would allow you to get on a plane was to show up at the airport and try to board a flight. The government would generally neither confirm nor deny that you were on the list, let alone tell you why.

      On April 14, the government announced a new procedure for blacklisted travelers to try to clear themselves. Passengers who are denied boarding can lodge a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, which will provide confirmation of their “No Fly List status,” and an unclassified summary of the reason why — unless providing that information would go against “national security and law enforcement interests.” The passengers can then appeal their status.

    • Lord Gill the Flouncing Fool

      The Lord President of Scotland’s judges, Lord Gill, has made a complete fool of himself by leading British judges in a walk-out from the Commonwealth Law Conference. The action is in protest against Julian Assange’s participation by video-link in a panel discussion on surveillance and the role of the security services.

      The walk-out happened after Julian’s talk, not before it, which rather gives the impression that what Lord Gill and his fellow judges objected to was the content of Assange’s talk, rather than the fact of it. Assange stated among other points that nationalists were right to believe that MI5 were active against them in the referendum campaign.

    • Why confidential tips to the government may not be confidential after all

      Got a hot tip about federal waste, fraud or corruption? You should think twice about using the government’s own online systems for collecting such complaints.

      Many of them promise confidentiality but for years have sent sensitive data – including names, addresses and phone numbers of whistleblowers, as well as the details of their allegations – across the Internet in a way that could be intercepted by hackers or snoops. Or, perhaps worse still, by the agencies named in the complaints.

    • ACLU Study: Federal Agencies Fail to Protect Whistleblower Communications, Terrorist Tip Line

      This week, the ACLU submitted a letter to the U.S. Chief Information Officer at the White House alerting him to serious cybersecurity lapses by numerous federal agencies. We identified dozens of inspectors general, including those at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, who do not use encryption to protect online whistleblower complaints of waste, fraud, and abuse. The State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” online terrorism tip line also does not use encryption.

    • A Decade After Blowing The Whistle On The FBI, Vindication

      The Justice Department eventually determined that the FBI had retaliated against Kobus for reporting misconduct.

    • Pirate Bay’s Fredrik Neij Can’t Play Nintendo Classics In Prison

      Former Pirate Bay operator Fredrik Neij can’t play games on his Nintendo 8-bit console in prison. The prison denied the request because there’s no way to open the box to check it for concealed items, a decision the Pirate Bay operator is now appealing before the administrative court.

    • Roommates hospitalized after stabbing one another during heated iPhone vs. Android debate

      Local Tulsa station KTUL reports that police responded to reports of an altercation at the Evergreen Apartments complex at 1 a.m. on Friday morning. Police learned that two roommates who lived in one of the apartments had been drinking and arguing over which popular smartphone platform was superior. Eventually they smashed their beer bottles and began stabbing one another with them. One roommate also smashed a beer bottle across the back of the other man’s head.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality wars: Telcos battle back

      Why are we still talking about Net neutrality — didn’t that fight end in a victory dance for advocates?

      Perhaps in a parallel universe ISPs graciously conceded defeat and an open Internet was secured for the ages, but in this reality, it’s not over until telecom companies have unleashed a full fury of lawyers. Gear up for another summer sequel, Net Neutrality Wars: The Lawyers Strike Back.

    • Net Neutrality and the Death of Distance

      The advent of smartphones and the mobile Internet has lead to a collision of both these worlds. In a world where bandwidth is abundant and cheap, the concept of metering based on distance will fade away. This is the reason that telcos are mortally scared of services like Skype, Whatsapp and others that take away their voice and SMS revenues. The death of distance is a consumer friendly evolution that the telcos will keep resisting till their last breath.

  • DRM

    • Netflix Sets Pricing Based on Local Piracy Rates

      Netflix says that the company is pushing down piracy in countries where illegal sharing is prevalent. Part of its strategy is to determine the price of its service based on local piracy rates, so it can better compete in places where piracy is rampant.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights/Sony

      • Sony referred to “WIPO treaty for blind as “stalking horse” to “denigrate the rights of copyright owners”

        In the new Wikileaks archives of leaked Sony documents (Link here), there is a memo (https://wikileaks.org/sony/docs/05/docs/DECE/DECE%20CP1%20-%20ss.doc.pdf), which describes Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) concern over the proposed WIPO treaty for copyright exceptions for persons who are blind or have other disabilities.

      • Sony

        Today, 16 April 2015, WikiLeaks publishes an analysis and search system for The Sony Archives: 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails, to and from more than 2,200 SPE email addresses. SPE is a US subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media corporation Sony, handling their film and TV production and distribution operations. It is a multi-billion dollar US business running many popular networks, TV shows and film franchises such as Spider-Man, Men in Black and Resident Evil.

      • The US Government Asked Sony to Help Counter ISIS Propaganda

        Today, WikiLeaks published a new searchable archive containing the leaked email inboxes of top Sony executives. Disturbingly, it shows that months after the hack, we’ve still only just begun investigating the close ties between Sony and the US government.

        “This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation,” WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said in a statement. “It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geopolitical conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there.”

        A search through the WikiLeaks Sony archive for “state.gov” email addresses—WikiLeaks reports that there are nearly 100 government email addresses in the archive—reveals an exceedingly cozy relationship between Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton and US government officials including the State Department, various international ambassadors, and the president.

      • Hollywood recruited to help fight IS, hacked emails show

        Top Hollywood executives including James Murdoch have been recruited to help the United States counter Islamic extremist propaganda, according to hacked Sony Pictures emails published by WikiLeaks.

      • WikiLeaks Publishes Over 30,000 Documents From Sony Hack

        The searchable archive shows employees at the studio discussing new releases and arranging meetings with top politicians

      • Sony Pictures Blindsided by WikiLeaks Document Dump

        Just when Sony Pictures thought it was done with the devastating hacking attack that brought the studio to its knees last winter, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks published thousands of internal documents and correspondence — totally blindsiding the studio and its public relations team early Thursday.

      • WikiLeaks republishes all documents from Sony hacking scandal

        WikiLeaks has republished the Sony data from last year’s hacking scandal, making all the documents and emails “fully searchable” with a Google-style search engine.

        The move provides much easier access to the stolen information. Searching the name of, for example, former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal, whose controversial comments were revealed by the hack, immediately yields nearly 5,700 results.

      • WikiLeaks Publishes Sony Documents

        WikiLeaks published more than 200,000 internal Sony Pictures Entertainment documents and e-mails, opening a new chapter in the hacking saga that enveloped Sony Corp.’s Hollywood studio late last year.

        The release includes 30,287 documents and 173,132 e-mails, sent from or received by more than 2,200 Sony Pictures e-mail addresses, according to a WikiLeaks statement Thursday. The material is searchable, giving legions of journalists and Sony competitors access to the information that was quickly taken down after it was first posted by hackers tied to North Korea.

      • WikiLeaks Creates Online Archive of Hacked Sony Documents

        Whistleblower site WikiLeaks on Thursday put hundreds of thousands of emails and documents from last year’s crippling cyberattack against Sony Pictures Entertainment into a searchable online archive. It’s the latest blow for the entertainment and technology company struggling to get past the attack, which the company estimates caused millions in damage.

        The website founded by Julian Assange said that its database includes more than 170,000 emails from Sony Pictures and a subsidiary, plus more than 30,000 other documents.

        Sony Pictures blasted WikiLeaks for creating the archive, saying the website was helping the hackers disseminate stolen information.

04.16.15

Links 16/4/2015: Opera for 32-bit GNU/Linux, New Chromebook Site

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • C/C++ dependency manager biicode becomes open-source project

    Biicode plans to progressively release every part of its codebase as part of a comprehensive open-source strategy.

  • Halogenics bets on Javascript, open source

    Melbourne-based software developer Halogenics is hoping within the next few months to have prototype versions of the next-generation of its Genotrack application.

    Genotrack, which helps biomedical research institutions manage animal tracking, breeding and reporting, is currently based on a classic client-server architecture.

    Genotrack 2 will be a Web application built with open source components including MongoDB for the database component and a Node.js-based application server with a Sencha Ext JS interface.

  • How to embrace the open source workforce

    Enterprises learned an important lesson on their way to embracing open source software: they could benefit from work that came from outside of their own rosters of employees. Now businesses are beginning to recognize that open source lessons apply beyond software development, and they are finding new ways to seek out talent beyond their walls.

  • 3 steps to writing an open source project case study

    Case studies about open source project participants and users are a great way to showcase your project and how it works in the real world.

    Such studies will highlight interesting features of your software, demonstrate different (and potentially unique) ways your project is in use, and foster positive communication among members of your community.

    Case studies are also about transparency: while talking to the end user of your software, you can also learn about things that are not necessarily running smoothly in your project. And although no one loves to hear about the things that are going wrong, such feedback can also be invaluable to you and your team.

  • 3 steps to writing an open source project case study

    Case studies about open source project participants and users are a great way to showcase your project and how it works in the real world.

    Such studies will highlight interesting features of your software, demonstrate different (and potentially unique) ways your project is in use, and foster positive communication among members of your community.

    Case studies are also about transparency: while talking to the end user of your software, you can also learn about things that are not necessarily running smoothly in your project. And although no one loves to hear about the things that are going wrong, such feedback can also be invaluable to you and your team.

  • Events

    • Flisol David, Chiriqui 2015

      Event started at 9 with a full house we started talks about free software, Fedora, Firefox OS, Mozilla, Docker and many other topics, we talk with students and teachers who were really into learning about Fedora and Free Software.

    • GNOME.asia 2015

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome 42 Eschews Some Extensions…Java in the Crosshairs

        In 2013, Google decreed that the longstanding Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI), which extensions have worked with for many years, is the source of many of the problems. And, Google decreed that extensions in the Chrome Web Store would be phasing out NPAPI support. Now, the latest release of the Chrome web browser, version 42, will block Oracle’s Java plugin by default as well as other extensions that use NPAPI. Some analysts are even calling it an effor to “push Java off the web.”

      • Chrome 42 for Android arrives with push notifications and home screen banners

        Want to master the CMO role? Join us for GrowthBeat Summit on June 1-2 in Boston, where we’ll discuss how to merge creativity with technology to drive growth. Space is limited and we’re limiting attendance to CMOs and top marketing execs. Request your personal invitation here!

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack: Can the open-source platform still win private cloud?

      “I think that doing open source work in a full committee style is often like pouring 1,000 engineers into a barrel and hoping they’ll produce the works of Shakespeare. The monkeys in the barrel just don’t manage to get it together, everybody wants to be the king and the directions and the priorities change.

      “It’s a very different situation to something like Linux, where you have a benevolent dictator Linus Torvalds controlling everything, or like Docker, where there is a corporate entity ultimately controlling the road map.”

    • Is Apache Spark Enterprise Ready?

      While Apache Spark could supplant Hadoop’s MapReduce engine, it is not yet enterprise ready, some experts say.

      Apache Spark is making headlines as potentially the next big thing in Big Data. Coverage has focused on Spark’s speed and its potential as a replacement for Hadoop’s famously difficult MapReduce engine.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Hungary universities move to EuroOffice and ODF

      The Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of EuroOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF), reports MultiRáció, the Budapest-based ICT firm that develops EuroOffice. Together, the two universities have about 45,000 students. In February the company signed a licence and support contract for 34,000 copies of EuroOffice.

    • LibreOffice 4.3.7 RC1 Arrives with Lots of Fixes for Microsoft Office Formats

      The Document Foundation has just released the first Release Candidate for LibreOffice 4.3.7, which is a stable and established branch of the office suite.

  • CMS

    • Drupageddon: SQL Injection, Database Abstraction and Hundreds of Thousands of Web Sites

      On October 29, 2014, the Drupal Security Team released advisory identifier DRUPAL-PSA-2014-003. This advisory informed administrators of Drupal-based Web sites that all Drupal-based Web sites utilizing vulnerable versions of Drupal should be considered compromised if they were not patched/upgraded before 2300 UTC on October 15, 2014 (seven hours following the initial announcement of the vulnerability in SA-CORE-2014-005).

      In the case of the Drupageddon vulnerability, the database abstraction layer provided by Drupal included a function called expandArguments that was used in order to expand arrays that provide arguments to SQL queries utilized in supporting the Drupal installation. Due to the way this function was written, supplying an array with keys (rather than an array with no keys) as input to the function could be used in order to perform an SQL injection attack.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hurd 0.6 released

      To compile the Hurd, you need a toolchain configured to target i?86-gnu; you cannot use a toolchain targeting GNU/Linux. Also note that you cannot run the Hurd “in isolation”: you’ll need to add further components such as the GNU Mach microkernel and the GNU C Library (glibc), to turn it into a runnable system.

      This new release bundles bug fixes and enhancements done since the last release.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Slovakia includes Open Education and Open Justice in its 2nd Action Plan

      Slovakia joined the OGP project in 2011 and then published its first Action Plan for 2012-2013. Since then, the Slovakian government has implemented several measures to fight against corruption and promote transparency and eParticipation in political life: a national Open Data portal (data.gov.sk) and its “Guidelines for the involvement of the public in the creation of public policies” – to promote a participatory approach in ministries. A participatory budget has also been implemented in Bratislava, the Slovakian government said in a statement.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Radeon LLVM Code Generation Improvements Being Worked On

      It’s been a while since last having any major breakthroughs to talk about for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack, but steady work continues. Some recent Mesa commits to Git highlight some code generation improvements.

Leftovers

  • Box adds depth through Verold 3D modelling acquisition

    The INQUIRER spoke recently to representatives from the NHS looking to standardise document format and compatibility across systems in the national infrastructure through Vendor Neutral Archiving, while Apple and IBM have also made significant announcements in the tech arena this week.

  • Culture/DRM

    • Music Services Overtake CDs for First Time

      Revenue from digital-music downloads and subscriptions edged out those from CDs for the first time in 2014, holding overall sales steady at about $15 billion globally, a trade group said.

      Sales of CDs and other physical formats declined 8%, to $6.82 billion, while digital revenue grew nearly 7%, to $6.85 billion, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a report on Tuesday. Each of those represented 46% of overall music revenue. The other 8% came from sources such as radio airplay and licensing songs for television shows and films.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Here’s the Real Problem With Almonds

      Almonds: crunchy, delicious, and…the center of a nefarious plot to suck California dry? They certainly have used up a lot of ink lately—partly inspired by our reporting over the past year. California’s drought-stricken Central Valley churns out 80 percent of the globe’s almonds, and since each nut takes a gallon of water to produce, they account for close to 10 percent of the state’s annual agricultural water use—or more than what the entire population of Los Angeles and San Francisco use in a year.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Microsoft Patch Tuesday: The patches just keep coming

      For Microsoft, the vulnerabilities just keep popping up, and appear to be surfacing more quickly than ever before.

      Like last month, Microsoft issued a fairly large number of security bulletins for April Patch Tuesday—11 bulletins addressing 26 vulnerabilities. Last month brought 14 bulletins from Microsoft, covering 43 vulnerabilities.

    • Labs: Securing Your Home Fences

      You don’t have to be an ICT security professional these days to know that your Internet access device at home has not the best security reputation.

    • Metal Detectors at Sports Stadiums

      As a security measure, the new devices are laughable. The ballpark metal detectors are much more lax than the ones at an airport checkpoint. They aren’t very sensitive — people with phones and keys in their pockets are sailing through — and there are no X-ray machines. Bags get the same cursory search they’ve gotten for years. And fans wanting to avoid the detectors can opt for a “light pat-down search” instead.

  • Finance

    • When work isn’t enough to keep you off welfare and food stamps

      We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. We make assumptions about how they spend their resources (irresponsibly?), how they came to rely on aid (lack of hard work?), how they view their own public dependence (as a free ride rather than a humbling one?).

      We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven’t tried to help themselves — they haven’t bothered to find work.

    • 15 Companies That Paid Zero Income Tax Last Year (Despite $23 Billion In Profits).

      Due to completely messed up U.S. tax policies, some even got a rebate check. Only small businesses pay taxes. Big companies often pay nothing at all.

    • ALDI Is A Growing Menace To America’s Grocery Retailers

      ALDI is hard at work redefining the rules of shopper engagement and, in the process, eating away at the market share of many of America’s most venerable food retailers — and food manufacturers. Through a relentless pursuit of perfecting its own store brands portfolio and unique shopping experience, ALDI has become more than a nuisance — it is a major force that is on the verge of changing the grocery retailing landscape. One should not underestimate ALDI in the U.S. market.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Assange on Scotland

      Julian Assange has asserted that MI5 are active against Scottish nationalists, as the independence movement is seen as a threat to the UK. Happily, Julian being Julian there is now some traction for this in the corporate media. When I posted on it last week I received nothing from the corporate media except dismissal and abuse over twitter.

  • Privacy

    • Months After Appeals Argued, NSA Cases Twist in the Wind

      Three cases that likely lay the groundwork for a major privacy battle at the U.S. Supreme Court are pending before federal appeals courts, whose judges are taking their time announcing whether they believe the dragnet collection of Americans’ phone records is legal.

      It’s been more than five months since the American Civil Liberties Union argued against the National Security Agency program in New York, three months since legal activist Larry Klayman defended his thus far unprecedented preliminary injunction win in Washington, D.C., and two months since Idaho nurse Anna Smith’s case was heard by appeals judges in Seattle.

    • Intelligence Bill: Mass Opposition to Mass Surveillance!

      The Intelligence Billis currently being debated at a fast pace in the French National Assembly and the debates will continue until Thursday 16 April. However, both the French Government and rapporteur Urvoas refuse to hear the growing opposition pointing out the dangers of this unacceptable text. La Quadrature du Net calls on citizens to act and Members of Parliament to face their responsibilities by opposing this text altogether and mass surveillance in general.

    • No encryption? How very rude.

      It struck me today that when I email a new con­tact I now reflex­ively check to see if they are using PGP encryp­tion. A hap­pily sur­pris­ing num­ber are doing so these days, but most people would prob­ably con­sider my circle of friends and acquaint­ance to be eclectic at the very least, if not down­right eccent­ric, but then that’s prob­ably why I like them.

      There are still alarm­ing num­bers who are not using PGP though, par­tic­u­larly in journ­al­ist circles, and I have to admit that when this hap­pens I do feel a tad miffed, as if some basic mod­ern cour­tesy is being breached.

      It’s not that I even expect every­body to use encryp­tion — yet — it’s just that I prefer to have the option to use it and be able to have the pri­vacy of my own com­mu­nic­a­tions at least con­sidered. After all I am old enough to remem­ber the era of let­ter writ­ing, and I always favoured a sealed envel­ope to a postcard.

      And before you all leap on me with cries of “using only PGP is no guar­an­tee of secur­ity.…” I do know that you need a suite of tools to have a fight­ing chance of real pri­vacy in this NSA-saturated age: open source soft­ware, PGP, TOR, Tails, OTR, old hard­ware, you name it. But I do think the wide-spread adop­tion of PGP sets a good example and gets more people think­ing about these wider issues. Per­haps more of us should insist on it before com­mu­nic­at­ing further.

    • FAA investigating Florida mailman’s landing of gyrocopter on U.S. Capitol lawn

      Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Ruskin, told his friends he was going to do it. He was going to fly a gyrocopter through protected airspace and put it down on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, then try to deliver 535 letters of protest to 535 members of Congress.

      The stunt seemed so outlandish that not even his closest friend thought he would pull it off.

      “My biggest fear was he was going to get killed,” said Mike Shanahan, 65, of Apollo Beach, who works with Hughes for the Postal Service.

    • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: I’m bringing free internet to Europe ['free' surveillance]

      Mark Zuckerberg has revealed he will bring Facebook’s free internet project to Europe, saying that the service will be made available to anyone “who needs to be connected” to the web.

    • What is Internet.org and will it really come to Europe?

      Facebook’s CEO suggested in a Q&A yesterday that the company’s Internet.org project could come to Europe, but it is unlikely to happen any time soon

  • Civil Rights

    • Nigel Farage believes in a Britain which doesn’t exist

      At best Ukip believes in a Britain which never really existed. A Britain of bland food and pale faces. A Britain where the roads are all empty, and the voices are all English.

    • Cop who shot fleeing suspect not eligible for lethal injection

      The North Charleston, South Carolina policeman who was filmed April 4 shooting a fleeing suspect in the back is not eligible for the death penalty, prosecutors say.

      Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said there are no so-called “aggravating circumstances” present for the authorities to even consider the ultimate punishment for a shooting death that was viewed millions of times on social media and broadcast and cable television.

    • Lawyer representing whistle blowers finds malware on drive supplied by cops

      An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The Attack on Net Neutrality Begins

      The United States Telecom Association has filed a lawsuit to overturn the net neutrality rules set by the Federal Communications Commission this past February. In its Monday morning Press Release USTelecom, who represents Verizon and AT&T among others, said it filed a lawsuit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia joining a similar law suit filed by Alamo Broadband Inc.

    • Why Not? AT&T Adds Its Name To The Pile Of Lawsuits Against The FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules

      On Monday, the FCC’s net neutrality rules officially went into the Federal Register, which was also known as the starters’ gun for rushing to the courthouse to sue the FCC over those rules. Trade group USTelecom got there first with its filing, while a bunch of other trade groups, representing big cable companies (NCTAA), small cable companies (ACA) and big wireless companies (CTIA — ignoring the claims of its members Sprint and T-Mobile) were right behind them. Not to be left out, AT&T has also formally sued the FCC using the same basic complaint (“arbitrary and capricious, yo!”)

    • AT&T, but not Verizon and Comcast, sue FCC over net neutrality

      Out of the many lawsuits filed this week against the Federal Communications Commission, just one came from a major Internet service provider: AT&T.

      AT&T made no secret of its opposition to the FCC’s net neutrality order, but it was reported last month that trade groups rather than individual ISPs would lead the legal fight against the FCC. That has mostly been the case so far, with AT&T but not other big ISPs like Comcast or Verizon filing suit. Lawsuits have been filed by four consortiums representing cable, wireless, and telecommunications companies. One small provider in Texas called Alamo Broadband sued the FCC as well.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • California Bill Would Require Libraries Post Scary Warning Signs Not To Do Infringy Stuff With 3D Printers

        For a few years now, folks like Michael Weinberg have been pretty vocal about warning the world not to screw up 3D printing by falling for the same copyright/patenting mistakes that are now holding back other creative industries. Trying to lock up good ideas is not a good idea. Just recently we noted how 3D printing was challenging some long held beliefs about copyright, and we shouldn’t simply fall into the old ways of doing things. At our inaugural Copia Institute summit, we had a really fascinating discussion about not letting intellectual property freakouts destroy the potential of 3D printing.

04.15.15

Links 15/4/2015: Plasma 5.3 Beta, Docker’s New Funding

Posted in News Roundup at 4:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 5 Linux Laptops for Small Business

    A Linux laptop makes all kinds of sense for a small business. Not only is Linux the most secure computing platform, it’s highly efficient, which means that computing power goes toward doing actual work instead of powering a bloated operating system.

    It’s also very customizable without requiring a computer science degree. You can install and remove software with the click of a button, and Linux vendors don’t lard down their systems with junkware which, as we learned last month in Lenovo’s SuperFish Security Gaffe, delivers little value and big troubles. You just get good software that lets you go about your business.

  • Desktop

    • The Last 80 Days In Malta

      GNU/Linux share of page-views on the desktop are trending upwards thanks to the schools. There’s nothing like reaching the market when it is young.

    • Dell has a Linux version of its sleek XPS 13 laptop

      The nearly bezel-less Dell XPS 13 is one of our highest rated laptops, thanks namely to its compact size, attractive design and fast performance. But if Windows just isn’t your preferred operating system, now there’s another option to choose from: Linux. As part of its commitment to the platform, which took off with the introduction of Project Sputnik, Dell’s announced a Ubuntu-based developer edition of its sleek 13-inch laptop. Naturally, you’ll have a myriad of configurations to choose from, with prices ranging from $949 all the way to $1,849, depending on how specced out you want your Linux machine to be.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Toutou SlaXen 6.0 RCX Is Based on Puppy Linux Slacko 5.9.3 and Openbox 3.5.2

        Jean-Marie Josselin informed Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the final version of his Toutou SlaXen 6.0 RCX computer operationg, a lightweight distribution of Linux based on the upstream Puppy Linux Slacko 5.9.3 distro.

      • Windows Lookalike Q4OS Is Almost at Version 1.0

        Q4OS is a Linux a distribution that’s been developed to provides a close experience as that of a Windows operating systems, which is something that’s not usually done in the open source world. Now a new update has been made available and it looks like developers are finally closing in the final version.

      • Clonezilla Live 2.4.1-6 Now Supports Cloning of Disk Partitions Bigger than 16TB

        Steven Shiau announced on April 14 the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system, version 2.4.1-6.

      • Hanthana Linux 21 (Sinharaja) released

        This new release Hanthana Linux 21, is ship with several Desktop Enviroments such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Sugar and LXDE. There are several editions in Hanthana 21, for general usage (Hanthana 21 LiveDVD) , educational purpose you can use Hanthana 21 Edu and Hanthana 21 Dev can be use for Software Development purposes. For those who just use Office packages can download either Hanthana 21 Light) or Hanthana 21 Light2. Each of these editions comes with both i686 (32bit) and x86_64 (64bit) architectures and 10 ISO images available for download.

      • Semplice 7.0.1 bugfix release

        It’s my pleasure to announce the immediate release of the first bugfix release of Semplice 7.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fermilab’s Scientific Linux 7.1 Is Out and Ready for Download

        Scientific Linux 7.1 is a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, including Fermilab, is finally stable after a couple of RCs.

      • ‘Data scientists are very scarce,’ says Red Hat CIO

        It’s difficult to hire good data scientists as the right candidates are “very scarce” because universities and colleges have failed to adapt to meet the needs of the enterprise.

        That’s according to Lee Congdon, CIO of open source software provider Red Hat, who is attempting to shift the Raleigh, North Carolina-based firm towards a more “data driven” business model.

      • RDO OpenStack Simplifies Deployment and Stays Humble

        In an OpenStack arena where big players like HP and Red Hat itself are seeking to offer distinguished enterprise support for OpenStack, a support-less strategy may not seem promising, but RDO continues to have its fans. Any business with servers running RHEL or a similar platform can take advantage of it.

      • Fedora

        • ABRT and virtualization Test Days this week!

          This week in Fedora QA we have two Test Days! Today (yes, right now!) is ABRT Test Day. There are lots of tests to be run, but don’t let it overwhelm you – no-one has to do all of them! If you can help us run just one or two it’ll be great. A virtual machine running Fedora 22 is the ideal test environment – you can help us with Fedora 22 Beta RC2 validation testing too. All the information is on the Test Day page, and the abrt crew is available in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC (no, you darn kids, that’s not a hashtag) right now to help with any questions or feedback you have. If you don’t know how to use IRC, you can read these instructions, or just use WebIRC.

        • FUDCon Pune Planning meeting minutes: 2015-04-14

          We had our regular weekly FUDCon planning meeting today and most of the volunteers were present. We went through all the discussion topics and agendas. As the conference is approaching fast, we spent pretty decent time on travel section and it is high time for people who need sponsorship for travel and/or accommodation, please open a Fedora trac ticket for funding request here.

        • The Linux Setup – Kevin Fenzi, Fedora Infrastructure Leader

          I’m Kevin Fenzi, and I have been using Linux since about 1996 or so (Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 was my first Linux distro). Currently I am employed by Red Hat as Fedora Infrastructure Leader. Basically I maintain (with my team and the community) all the Fedora servers, including the build system, downloads, compose machines, end-user applications and so on. It’s a great place to work and a great community to be involved in. I’m also involved in lots of other places in Fedora.

    • Debian Family

      • Hello Debian Planet and Jessie’s question

        In Jessie we no longer have update-notifier-common which had the /etc/kernel/postinst.d/update-notifier script that allowed us to automatically reboot on a kernel update, I have apt-file searched for something similar but I haven’t found it, so… who is now responsible of echoing to /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs on a kernel upgrade so that the system reboots itself if we have configured unattended-upgrades to do so?

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • ​The five biggest changes in Ubuntu 15.04, Vivid Vervet

            While the new Ubuntu isn’t due out until April 23rd, the second beta is more than mature enough to see what we’ll be getting in the Vivid Vervet. A vervet, for those of you who are wondering, is an East African monkey.

            Based on my work with the beta over the last few days, here are the most important changes in Ubuntu 15.04. I’ve been using Ubuntu since the first version, 2004′s Ubuntu 4.10. These days, I use it on desktops, servers, and cloud. In other words, I know Ubuntu.

          • Shuttleworth: Linux 4.0 coming to Canonical Ubuntu in October

            CANONICAL BOSS Mark Shuttleworth has confirmed that Linux Kernel 4.0 should be making its debut in Ubuntu products before the end of the year.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi gains an E-paper display

      A Kickstarter project is pitching a HAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi that provides a 2.7-inch E-paper display, as well as a battery backed real time clock.

      For educators, one of the coolest things about the Raspberry Pi is the HDMI port, which let you easily plug in to a monitor. But for embedded gizmos, a more modest display is often more suitable. It doesn’t get much more modest than Percheron Electronics’s E-Paper HAT Display, a Raspberry Pi add-on board that drives a 2.7-inch, 264 x 176-pixel E-paper display from Pervasive Displays.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Accuweather for Samsung Z1 Tizen Smart Phone

          Most of time we need to refer to the weather, what to wear, where to go, umbrella or no umbrella? This is where a reliable weather app comes in handy.

        • Nuance Clinical Documentation Tool Florence for Samsung Gear S

          Nuance Communications have announced their newest innovations that brings clinical documentation to smart devices, smart watches and the Internet of Things.

        • Game of Games for the Tizen Samsung Z1

          Here is a new game with a new twist. What you have to do is “Look at the image and guess the game”. A simple game that lets you learn and explore a trivia app that promises to cover every classic game!

        • ShareNote for Samsung Z1 Tizen SmartPhone

          ShareNote is an app that lets you easily store all the information that you might need as go by your day-to-day business. anything that comes to mind can be easily stored for future retrival

        • Redbend Provides Over-the-Air Software Management Solutions for Samsung’s Tizen Smartphones

          Redbend, is a company that catalyzes change in the connected world and boasts the ability of keeping more than 2 billion automotive, IoT and mobile devices updated, has announced that it will be providing its Over the Air (OTA) solution to the Tizen based Samsung Z1. Redbend’s OTA updating solutions will enhance the reliability and performance of the platform and software on Samsung Tizen handsets.

      • Android

        • Opera Mini finally behaves like a native Android web browser

          If you’re an Opera fan on Android, you no longer have to choose between Opera Mini’s super-efficient web browsing and the native interface of its full-size sibling. The company has overhauled Mini to finally give it the Android-friendly look and core features of the regular browser, including redesigned Speed Dial shortcuts, a private browsing mode and a customizable design that scales nicely to tablet sizes. There’s also a much-needed, Mini-specific data gauge so that you know how many megabytes you’re saving. Give it a spin if you’re trying to squeeze the most you can out of a capped cellular plan.

        • WhatsApp for Android gets a much-needed Material Design makeover, bringing cleaner layouts and new icons
        • ‘Hearthstone’ Arrives On iOS And Android Phones At Last
        • Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Update Release Continues

          The Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop update is finally starting to make some moves and today, the Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update that’s begun to roll out for another one of Google’s variants. Just not the one that most people were expecting.

        • Google wants Android developers to make more kid-friendly apps

          Amazon has had a hard time keeping up with the sheer breadth of Google Play’s app selection, but it’s done a pretty great job when it comes to putting a spotlight on kid and family content. There’s FreeTime Unlimited, a (cheap) monthly subscription service that gives younger users access to a wide selection of age-appropriate ebooks, movies, TV shows, educational apps, and games. And the company puts a worry-free guarantee behind its Fire HD Kids Edition; break the thing at any point over the course of two years, and Amazon will replace it for free.

        • New Android App Unlocks Your Phone At The Sound Of Your Voice

          The Android 5.0 Lollipop already lets you skip the traditional lock screen via Trusted Face, which uses facial recognition to make sure you’re you, or if you’re connected to a Trusted Device, like a specific Bluetooth. Now, Google is adding a new smart lock: Trusted Voice, which uses voice recognition to check your identity.

        • LTE-Equipped Nexus 7 2013 (Razorg) Finally Gets The Android 5.1 Update

          It’s been, what, five weeks since Google announced Android 5.1? In all that time the update has still not arrived on many of Mountain View’s Nexus devices. At least one more is joining the 5.1 club today, and it’s a little unexpected—the LTE Nexus 7 2013. No, the WiFi version still hasn’t popped up.

        • LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop Update Problems & Fixes

          Over the past few months LG and its partnering carriers have been busy pushing the LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop update out to owners around the globe. And while most of the feedback has been positive, the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is also causing problems for many. The LG G2 in the US received Android 5.0 in February on AT&T, it hit Verizon in late March, and starting today is rolling out to T-Mobile owners.

        • This amazing secret trick will give any Android phone a huge speed boost

          We could spend all day counting all of the things that make Android a great platform, but for real smartphone enthusiasts, the operating system’s tweakability is surely somewhere near the top of the list. If there’s functionality you’re looking for that your Android smartphone doesn’t have out of the box, the odds are pretty good that an app or a tweak is waiting to solve your problem.

        • Brussels to investigate Google’s Android

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Researchers try to hack the economics of zero-day bugs

      If you’re looking to reduce the pool of possible zero-day vulnerabilities that could potentially be used for criminal or state-sponsored breaches of computer and network security, throwing people and money at the problem isn’t necessarily going to solve it. At least, that’s the conclusion from a team of researchers at MIT, Harvard, and the security firm HackerOne (the organization that runs the Internet Bug Bounty program). At next week’s RSA Conference, HackerOne Chief Policy Officer Katie Moussouris and Dr Michael Siegel of MIT’s Sloan School will present a study on the economics of the marketplace for “zero-day” vulnerabilities in software and networks, showcasing a model for how that market behaves. Spoiler: their model isn’t simply driven by supply and demand.

      [...]

      At last year’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Dan Geer—a computer security analyst and chief information security officer of the CIA-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel—suggested that the US government should simply corner the market on vulnerabilities, offering “six-figure prices” to compete with the black market for zero-days. Geer also said this approach would only work if vulnerabilities were scarce; if they are plentiful, there would be no amount of money that could possibly buy up all the potential attack vectors.

    • Maine Police Pay Ransomware Demand in Bitcoin [Windows]

      In an effort to keep their computer files from being destroyed, a group of cooperative police departments in Maine paid a $300 ransom demand—in bitcoin.

      According to local news station WCSH-TV, the shared computer system of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office and four town police departments was infected with the “megacode” virus.

    • Former Security Director For Lottery Charged With Tampering Equipment Before Secretly Buying $14.3 Million Winning Ticket

      If someone hasn’t already sold the movie rights to the story of Eddie Raymond Tipton, expect it to happen soon. Tipton, an Iowa-based former “security director” for the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), is accused of trying to pull off the perfect plot to allow himself to win the lottery. It didn’t work, but not for the lack of effort. MUSL runs a bunch of the big name lotteries in the US, including Mega Millions and Powerball. It also runs the somewhat smaller Hot Lotto offering, which was what Tipton apparently targeted. When he was arrested back in January, the claims were that it had to do with him just playing and winning the lottery and then trying to hide the winnings. Lottery employees are (for obvious reasons) not allowed to play. However, late last week, prosecutors in Iowa revealed that it was now accusing Tipton of not just that, but also tampering with the lottery equipment right before supposedly winning $14.3 million. Because of these new revelations, Tipton’s trial has been pushed back until July. However, the details of the plot and how it unraveled feel like they come straight out of a Hollywood plot.

    • Prosecutors: Evidence indicates lottery vendor employee tampered with equipment

      Prosecutors believe there is evidence indicating a former information-security director for a lottery vendor in Iowa tampered with lottery equipment before buying a Hot Lotto ticket that would go on to win $14.3 million, according to court documents filed Thursday.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Scrap fossil fuel subsidies now and bring in carbon tax, says World Bank chief

      Poor countries are feeling “the boot of climate change on their neck”, the president of the World Bank has said, as he called for a carbon tax and the immediate scrapping of subsidies for fossil fuels to hold back global warming.

      Jim Yong Kim said awareness of the impact of extreme weather events that have been linked to rising temperatures was more marked in developing nations than in rich western countries, and backed for the adoption of a five-point plan to deliver low-carbon growth.

      Speaking to the Guardian ahead of this week’s half-yearly meeting of the World Bank in Washington DC, Kim said he had been impressed by the energy of the divestment campaigns on university campuses in the US, aimed at persuading investors to remove their funds from fossil fuel companies.

    • Tribes say no to Keystone

      Native Americans are pressuring the Obama administration to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, warning the project could infringe on their water rights, harm sacred land and violate America’s treaty obligations.

      Tribes sent more than 100 pages of letters to the Interior Department earlier this year raising concerns about the project, which would carry oil sands from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Reporting on Russia’s Troll Army, Western Media Forget West’s Much Bigger, Sophisticated Troll Army

      If this appears to be a coordinated messaging effort on behalf of a US military psychological operation, that’s because it almost certainly is. On cue, despite the anonymous sourcing, and the utter staleness of the “revelation” in question, the media uncritically ran with the US government-backed report. In all these stories, however, the rather glaring fact that the US has a long-documented history of manipulating social media is not mentioned once. In fact, the Pentagon’s efforts alone–to say nothing of other US intelligence agencies or other NATO nation states–spent at least 200 times more than Russia, according to the last available figures (Guardian, 3/17/11)…

      [...]

      Israel has students” “defending” it online. The UK has “warriors” countering “enemy propaganda.” The Kremlin has “trolls” spreading “propaganda.” The general public’s ignorance of how these complicated mechanisms of online infiltration work is heavily shaped by how they’re framed. Notice, for example, the images that go with these reports on Israel vs. Russia paying people en masse to spam comment sections and social media. On one side, you have a daytime shot of patriotic young people waving flags outside Auschwitz…

      [...]

      Reading Western press, however, one would get the distinct impression the US–with a military budget greater than the next 15 countries combined–is really a scrappy underdog looking to catch up to the mass of Kremlin troll hordes. This impression, while making for a neat story, does little to provide proper context or truly explain the informational challenge posed by social media manipulation.

    • Scott Walker’s Supreme Court Coup

      Walker and the Republican controlled legislature set about systematically destroying this clean election structure. They dismantled Wisconsin’s 34-year-old partial public financing system for other statewide and legislative elections. They repealed the Impartial Justice law which provided public financing for state Supreme Court elections. That same year they enacted one of the most extreme and restrictive voter photo ID laws in the nation, which threatens to disenfranchise some 300,000 Wisconsinites, and passed 19 other “model” bills lifted from the American Legislative Exchange Council playbook.

  • Censorship

    • UK Government Can Now Hand Out Two-Year Sentences For Revenge Porn, Online Trolling

      Fortunately, the law contains affirmative defenses, including one for journalistic entities or other disclosures in the public interest. It also appears to keep the burden of proof (mostly) where it should be: on the entity bringing the charges.

      However, this amendment seems to be more borne of social pressure than actual need. Trafficking in revenge porn has been punished successfully under the UK’s harassment laws. This law just feels extraneous — a way to “do something” that increases penalties for violating existing harassment laws. There’s a two-year maximum sentence attached to this amendment, which is far lower than the surprising 18 years handed to revenge porn site operator Kevin Bollaert, but far more than a previous “revenge porn” prosecution under the UK’s already existing laws, which only netted a 12-week sentence.

      The enacted amendments also give UK Justice Secretary Chris Grayling what he wanted: increased penalties for the crime of being a jerk online. The UK has jailed trolls before, but now the government has a new upper limit on sentencing – quadrupling the former 6-month maximum.

    • Music Industry Wants Cross Border Pirate Site Blocks

      Music industry group IFPI released its latest Digital Music Report today. Documenting the latest developments in the ongoing piracy battle, the report suggests that pirate site blockades are hugely effective. According to the music group it’s now time for blocking orders to have a cross border effect.

  • Privacy

    • Confronting the surveillance state

      By Memorial Day weekend, Congress will likely have decided whether the federal government’s mass surveillance programs — exposed first by The New York Times in December 2005 and more broadly by National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 — will be partially reined in or will instead become a dominant, permanent feature of American life.

      The creation of what many refer to as the “American Surveillance State” began in secret, just days after the Sept. 11 attacks. As the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldered, President Bush and his top national security and intelligence advisers were making decisions that would trigger a constitutional crisis over surveillance programs that the public was told was essential to combating terrorism. The first act in this post-Sept.11 drama began on Capitol Hill.

    • No Fly List: Govt Offers New Redress Procedures

      The government will no longer refuse to confirm or deny that persons who are prevented from boarding commercial aircraft have been placed on the “No Fly List,” and such persons will have new opportunities to challenge the denial of boarding, the Department of Justice announced yesterday in a court filing.

    • An unlikely hack lands Edward Snowden in The White House

      After turning up as a sculpture in Brooklyn Park and making an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Edward Snowden has finally returned home. In fact, if you look at Google Maps right now, it appears he’s marched all the way to the president’s office, presumably to find out exactly who has copies of his dick pics.

      In its mobile app and on desktop, Google is showing a business listing for a fake shop named “Edwards Snow Den” slap bang in the middle of The White House. Could this be the search giant’s way of suggesting a rapprochement between the US administration and the famed whistle blower? Unfortunately not: the out-of-place Snow Den is simply the result of someone changing the location of a verified business listing after it’s gone live on Google Maps.

  • Civil Rights

    • CBS4 Investigation: TSA Screeners At DIA Manipulated System To Grope Men’s Genitals

      A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.

      It happened roughly a dozen times, according to information gathered by CBS4.

      According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he “gropes” male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA.

      “He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”

      Although the TSA learned of the accusation on Nov. 18, 2014 via an anonymous tip from one of the agency’s own employees, reports show that it would be nearly three months before anything was done.

    • New Mexico Passes Law Saying Law Enforcement Can’t Steal Your Property Without A Criminal Conviction

      We’ve been talking for a while about the ridiculousness of the civil asset forfeiture system in the US, whereby law enforcement can basically steal what they want (and some cops will even admit that, to them, it’s shopping for stuff they want). If you don’t remember, it basically just involves police taking stuff and then insisting that it was ill-gotten goods from some sort of law breaking activity — which would be kept by filing a civil lawsuit against the stuff itself rather than the person. There didn’t need to be any criminal conviction at all. Earlier this year, Eric Holder tried to limit the DOJ’s assistance of such shopping sprees by law enforcement, but police were still open to using the process to take stuff.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Council of The European Union To Kill Net Neutrality : We Must Act!

      On 3 April, the European Parliamant voted a text in favour of Net Neutrality, protecting a free and open Internet, but Member States gathered at the Council of Ministers have come back on the progress made. The legislation process continues in the form of negotiations to lead in an agreement between the European Parliament, European Commission and the Council of the European Union. In order to protect and guarantee all the advances from last year’s vote, a coalition of civil society organisations have launched the campaing website savetheinternet.eu and urge citizens to call their eurodeputy to defend their rights and freedoms

    • Despite Claiming To Want To Negotiate A Net Neutrality ‘Compromise,’ Many Republicans Rush In To Kill New Rules

      It’s getting rather ridiculous to have to keep repeating it at this point, but it’s fairly ridiculous that net neutrality/open internet is a partisan issue at all. The public overwhelmingly supports net neutrality, no matter which party they’re associated with. It’s only the politicians who think this is a red team vs. blue team issue. But, for whatever reason (and much of it appears to do with campaign fundraising), net neutrality has become partisan, with Republicans “against” it and Democrats “for” it. So, with the rules now officially in the Federal Register, not only have the lawsuits begun, but so has the Republican wrangling in Congress to try to kill the laws.

    • Wireless, Cable Industries Show Their Love Of An ‘Open Internet’ By Suing To Overturn Net Neutrality Rules

      Now that the FCC’s net neutrality rules have been published in the Federal Register, the broadband industry has fired its litigation cannons and filed the expected lawsuits via all of the major trade organizations (see suits for the NCTA, ACA and CTIA, pdfs). All of the suits proclaim that the FCC’s new net neutrality rules, and its reclassification of broadband providers as common carriers under Title II are an “arbitrary and capricious” implementation of “outdated utility style regulations” that will harm the greater Internet, sector innovation and industry investment (claims even the industry itself has admitted are bunk, yet never seem to go away).

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom Megaupload case falters over sharing Canadian data

        More than three years have passed since Canadian police seized 32 Megaupload servers on behalf of U.S. authorities seeking to prosecute company founder Kim Dotcom in one of the world’s largest copyright infringement cases.

        Still, no one — except perhaps officials with the file-sharing company itself — knows what’s on the servers.

        At issue now is how much of this seized Canadian data can be shared with the U.S. Department of Justice, which is very eager to press its case against Dotcom, who is currently fighting extradition from New Zealand, where he’s a permanent resident.

04.14.15

Links 14/4/2015: 3DR Dronecode, Z1/Z2 Tizen

Posted in News Roundup at 7:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Dramatic Takeoff of GNU/Linux On The Desktop In Malta

      Malta is one of those places where the small size allows one to see significant migrations to GNU/Linux desktop in their full glory. Notice the ascendance of GNU/Linux in the same week that school started that year.

    • Desktop Linux Made Easy

      Ask any casual Linux enthusiast whether Linux is easy to use and they’ll tell you once installed, it’s very simple to navigate. The problem with the Linux desktop in 2015 isn’t how easy the desktop environment(s) are to work with, but whether the applications provided are easy enough for the average user at a workstation.

  • Server

    • IBM Deepens its Cloud Services Entrenchment with the U.S. Government

      IBM is making further inroads into getting its cloud computing tools and infrastructure solidified with the U.S. government. Big Blue recently announced that the U.S. Army is using IBM Hybrid Cloud to power one of the biggest logistics systems in the federal government. The new hybrid cloud system will be part of an ambitious Army data center designed to connect the IBM Cloud to the Army’s on-premise environment to enable use of data analytics. The Army foresees cost savings of 50 percent over its current cost structure, based on migrations to IBM’s cloud tools.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • EFL 1.14 Beta Brings Ecore-DRM Improvements

      Just one week after the EFL 1.14 Alpha 1 release marks the availability of Enlightenment Foundation Libraries’ 1.14 Beta 1 debut.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • You can come to the Randa Meetings 2015 – Please register now

        The dates for the sixth edition of the Randa Meetings are set: Sunday, 6th to Sunday 13th of September 2015. The first Sunday will be the day of arrival and the last Sunday accordingly the day of departure.

      • Some Skrooge news

        I’ve been alerted a few weeks ago that the Skrooge web site had been hacked, using some URL Injection. After attempting some enquiry and cleanup, I gave up : I couldn’t find the compromised code, and was not able to fix it. This is how I realized that sysadmin is a real job, and I am not one ! After asking some help on kde-www, Albert quickly prompted me to kde-sysadmins, and Ben Cooksley offered to clean the website and host it on kde servers.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • The 5 best distros for the Gnome desktop

        Gnome 3.16 was released recently and I considered it to be one of the best Gnome releases ever. A few weeks ago we did an extremely popular story on some of the best distros which offer great Plasma experience. So I decided to check out which distros offer a similar kind of Gnome experience.

        I have been using Gnome 3.16 on several machines and I am extremely impressed with the improvements, though I think there is still a lot to be improved. From among all the distros that I used, I picked those that offered the best Gnome experience out of the box.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Exploring SuperX 3.0

        Version 3.0 of SuperX can be downloaded as a 1.6GB ISO file. There are two builds available, one for 32-bit and another for 64-bit machines. Booting from the live media brings up the KDE desktop environment. The desktop’s wallpaper is soft blue. On the desktop we find a single icon for launching the distribution’s system installer. At the bottom of the screen we find the application menu, task switcher and system tray. Clicking the application menu button brings up a full screen application menu with large, colourful icons. I want to talk about the application menu more, but first let’s briefly talk about SuperX’s system installer.

      • Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 Cinnamon review

        Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a desktop distribution that’s based on Debian. It’s from the same folks responsible for Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu Desktop.

        The latest edition, Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 (LMDE 2), code-named Betsy, was released on April 10 (2015). Upgrading from LMDE 1 to 2 is not yet supported, but that should change soon. If you’re using Linux Mint 17, do not attempt to upgrade because the distributions are not compatible.

        Installation images for the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments were made available for download. This article offers a very cursory review of LMDE 2 Cinnamon.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Review: Sabayon 15.02 KDE

        This weekend has been a little slower than usual for work, so I have a little more time to do a review. Several weeks ago, I downloaded the latest version of Sabayon and kept it for a time (as now) when I’d be free to do a review. Moreover, looking through the archives of this blog, I realized that it’s been almost 3 years since I’ve looked at Sabayon, so a fresh review is long overdue.

    • Arch Family

      • Latest Antergos Live CD Includes GNOME 3.16, Based on Arch Linux

        On April 12, the Antergos development team, through Dustin Falgout, announced the immediate availability for download of an updated installation media for their Antergos Linux distribution based on the upstream Arch Linux operating system and featuring the latest GNOME 3.16 desktop environment.

    • Red Hat Family

      • RDO OpenStack Promises Easy, Free Open Source Cloud Computing

        RDO is a version of OpenStack designed for use on CentOS, a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Actually, “based on” is a bit of a stretch, because CentOS is basically the RHEL source code recompiled by third parties—which is totally legal and kosher with Red Hat, of course, since the source is open. The only difference between CentOS and RHEL is that the former comes with no enterprise-class support or ecosystem integration.

      • Update: Short Interest of Red Hat, Inc. Drops by -6.6%

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 22 Virt Test Day is Thu Apr 16!

          It’s a great time to make sure your virt workflow is still working correctly with the latest packages in Fedora 22. No requirement to run through test cases on the wiki, just show up and let us know what works (or breaks).

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • 9 ways Android Wear is better than the Apple Watch

      Right off the bat, you have many more Android Wear options because a bunch of different companies have taken their own shot at an Android-powered smartwatch, including Motorola, LG, Huawei, Samsung, and Sony. There are 8 different designs so far.

    • 3DR’s Solo Drone Boasts Dual Linux Computers Running Dronecode

      3DRobotics today announced its first Linux-based drone, a Solo quadcopter touted as the first Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to support full control of GoPro cameras and deliver live-streaming HD video to mobile devices. The ground controller, as well as the drone’s Pixhawk 2 autopilot, integrates a 1GHz Cortex-A9 computer running Linux. The Solo is available for pre-sale at $1,000, or $1,400 with a GoPro gimbal, with units shipping via 2,000 locations starting May 29.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

      • Android

        • Why is Android so different from Linux distros?

          Android is based on Linux, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the same as your average Linux distribution. A redditor wanted to know why Android is so different from the desktop distributions that we all know and love.

        • Verizon’s LG G3 Is Finally Getting Its Android 5.0 Update

          The wait for Android 5.0 to arrive on the LG G3 has varied widely based on carrier—AT&T managed to get it released rather quickly and T-Mobile just rolled it out a week or two ago. Now it’s Verizon’s turn to get the Lollipop update done.

        • ICYMI: You Can Soon Unlock Your Android Phone With Just Your Voice
        • Trusted Voice unlock is rolling out to some Android users

          When the latest version of Google’s Android app arrived last week, there was a hint that a new method for unlocking a device was on the way. Well, it seems the wait is over… for some.

        • LG G4 leaks: ‘Gorgeous’ Android flagship in real leather (and fake carbon fiber)

          If you’re waiting to see what the next LG flagship phone looks like, wait no longer. Here’s the LG G4, in all its leather-clad glory. It’s no clone.

          The secret site the images were snarfed from didn’t give much of a clue about the hardware specs — what was there were clearly placeholders — but if you like stitched leather, you’ll love the G4.

        • 4 ways your Android device is tracking you (and how to stop it)

          So there I was, poking around some of the more arcane settings on my Moto G, when I stumbled across something that took me aback: an archive of every voice command I’d ever spoken to my phone.

          Turns out that each time you say something to the Google Now search box, Android saves a copy of what you said in your “Voice & Audio” history. Your voice history can go back months or even years, and it includes a transcript of what you said plus a playback button, so you can relive the moment.

        • Motorola’s 5-incher finds the G-spot: Moto G 4G budget Android smartie

          Back in December 2013, I hailed the first generation Motorola Moto G as the best affordable smartphone on the market. If you want a reasonably compact 4.5-inch device, then, arguably, it still is the best, thanks to a midlife facelift that added a microSD slot and 4G reception.

        • Sony delivers Android 5.0 to Xperia Z3 Dual, Z1 and more

          Android 5.0 Lollipop is ready to roll on half a dozen Sony smartphones.

        • Deal alert: Get $100 off one of the world’s best Android Wear watches
        • Buy an Android smartphone and Moto 360 from Best Buy, get $100 off the total purchase

          Even though the successor to Motorola’s Android Wear smartwatch, the Moto 360, seems to be right around the corner, the original is still considered one of the better smartwatches currently available. Through Best Buy’s newest promotion, that purchase just became much more easygoing on your wallet.

        • Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Update: Is It Worth Installing Right Now?

          We’ve been using the Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop update for a number of weeks. And now that the update is rolling out in full force, Nexus 5 users are faced with a decision about whether to install Google’s latest firmware. With some experience under our belts, we want to help with your decision. This is our Nexus 5 Android 5.1 review at the three week mark.

        • Best new apps for Android and iOS (April 7th – April 13th 2015)

          Hey there, app hunters! As we do each week, we’ve combed through the Android and iOS stores once again to look for something interesting for you to download and play around with. Keeping track of the new apps that come out for the lighthearted, so should you desire to have a look at some fresh offerings each week, yet feel daunted by the heap of information you’d have to dig through, feel free to check back regularly.

        • Watch HBO Now on Android and Roku right now

          Think an iDevice is the only way to get HBO’s new streaming service? Think again. For $9.99 you can sling it just about anywhere — for three months.

        • 5 Things to Know About the Nexus 4 Android 5.1 Update

          Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop update is missing for a number of Nexus devices though it looks like we can finally take the Nexus 4 Android 5.1 update off of the list. With an OTA in sight, we take a look at what users need to know, right now, about the Nexus 4 Android 5.1 Lollipop update.

        • These E3 Android Wear Watch Bands are Really, Really Nice

          Last week, Google announced a set of official partnerships with a handful of companies willing to make watch bands for Android Wear devices. One of those companies is E3 Motocycles, a shop out of Brooklyn, NY, who specializes in hand-made products that use quality materials like Horween leather. Out of the group that was announced by Google, the E3 watch bands were the closest to our personal tastes in watch bands, so we picked a few up. Man, these are incredible.

        • Android 5.0.2 pushed out for Sony Xperia Z1, Xperia Z1 Compact and Xperia Z Ultra

          Android 5.0.2 is now reaching the Sony Xperia Z1, Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and the Sony Xperia Z Ultra. The update is being disseminated to certain regions only, and offers build number 14.5.A.0.242. The update includes the new Material Design, Lock Screen notifications, the new 64-bit ART runtime compiler that will open apps faster, new “Recent Apps” screen, Project Volta for extended battery life, and more.

        • Some Nexus 5 Owners Afflicted By Camera Crashes Following Android 5.1 Update

          Updates get us excited, especially when they involve making the leap to the latest version of Android. But for some Nexus 5 users, the transition has come at the expense of their camera. Following the release of Android 5.1, they’ve been unable to reliably activate the camera without getting hit by crashes.

        • No, not that Cloud: Final Fantasy XIII now streaming to iOS, Android devices

          Square Enix games are hardly missing from mobile devices, but most of what you’ll see from the company are ports of its older games. Dragon Quest VIII, which originally launched on the PlayStation 2, was about as recent as it gets. At least it was until now.

        • Android 5.1 Lollipop OTA now available for the Nexus 4

          When Google announced Android 5.1 Lollipop last month, the new version of Android quickly began rolling out to multiple Nexus family devices. There are still a few Nexus handsets that have yet to see the update, but today we can check one more off the list – the Nexus 4. The OTA, which is available now, weighs in at only 174MB and will bring your device from build number LRX22C to LMY47O.

        • HTC One M8 Will Skip Android 5.0.2 And Go Straight To Android 5.1, HTC One M7 May Get 5.1 Too

          A new report indicates that HTC will skip Android 5.0.2 for the HTC One M8, which will go straight to 5.1 Lollipop at some time in the future. The older HTC One M7 may get 5.1 as well, despite a recent announcement that it will not.

        • Opera Launches Redesigned Opera Mini For Android

          Opera Mini, the little brother to Opera’s regular mobile browser, is getting a major makeover on Android today. The company says the new design, which is pretty much in line with the regular Opera mobile browser, is meant to give the browser a more native look and feel.

        • Samsung Galaxy S6 Review: The Best Android Phone Of All Time

          There has been something very surprising about the levels of interest I’ve seen with the S6 and S6 Edge, namely that the interest seems to be focused now, as the phone goes on sale, on the S6 instead of the Edge.

          This is the reverse of what I noticed when I published my initial hands-on reviews of the device from a pre-brief held in London ahead of their launch at Mobile World Congress. And indeed, I was at MWC – I was a guest of Samsung, covering the show for one of my British publishers – and the buzz there was all about the Edge.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Pivotal Open-Sources In-Memory Database Geode

    Geode and GemFire compete directly and indirectly in the market with SAP HANA, Teradata and Oracle products.

    Pivotal, EMC’s big data development platform-as-a-service (PaaS) division, on April 13 released Geode, a distributed in-memory database, to the open-source community as a key part of the eventual release of its entire big data platform to the community.

  • Pivotal Gets Open Sourcier

    You can’t help but wonder if EMC Federation boss Joe Tucci is reaching for his stress ball today. His company’s spawn, Pivotal Software, is open sourcing the core of GemFire, its distributed in-memory database.

    We asked Tucci to comment, but he hasn’t gotten back to us yet. And though his press spokesperson told us “we’re for it,” when it comes to open source, we suspect that it might feel a bit like watching your teenager turn your mansion into a commune.

  • PARCC Selects Open Source Platform for Non-Summative Assessments

    “Open source was a key requirement of the PARCC non-summative assessment tools delivery system because it allows us to more easily integrate the platform with other partners and opportunities in the future, as well as leverage the collective open source community contributions to the platform development,” said Jeff Cuff, director of technology at Parcc Inc., the nonprofit organization that manages the assessment system on behalf of the PARCC states, in a prepared statement. “Even more importantly, it is a highly economical approach for the states participating in the consortium, providing significant savings for maintenance compared to other options.”

  • Curoverse Begins Trial Run for Open Source Genomics Tool

    The move is the latest step for Curoverse, a startup that emerged from George Church’s Personal Genome Project at Harvard. The PGP was a plan led by Church to sequence more than 100,000 genomes in the U.S. and link them to individuals’ health information. (The same kind of aggregation, but of 1 million people’s genomic and other health information, is a goal of the Obama administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative.) Church needed a massive database to house all that information, and that’s what led to the creation of Arvados. It’s a database capable of storing giant amounts of genomic information, it’s shareable, it can run on both public and private cloud services, and it’s an open source platform, so anyone can use or modify the source code.

  • Hello Geode: Pivotal GemFire is now open source

    Making good on its promise from earlier in the year, Pivotal has released as open source the distributed in-memory database that powers GemFire, a featured part of Pivotal’s Big Data Suite Hadoop product.

    It’s another step on Pivotal’s road toward building an open source base for its Big Data Suite rather than keeping them on a proprietary leash. However, Pivotal still sees ways it could monetize its Hadoop products — even as advances in open source squeeze companies with proprietary offerings.

  • The Culture of Freedom: Free Software, Free Speech

    For the concluding part of may talk, I explored how this open source methodology manifested itself in the world of open publishing. The fact that it is net-based is hugely important, because it means that the barrier to publishing has been lowered almost to the point of disappearing. That matters, because as A. J. Liebling famously said: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”. Today, thanks to the Internet, we have all the advantages of owning a press without any of the massive costs or organisational issues.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Start Drafting Plans To Deprecate Insecure HTTP

        Barnes is hoping for more people to move to HTTPS by limiting new browser features from becoming available over insecure HTTP, in the name of security. He wrote in a mailing list post, “In order to encourage web developers to move from HTTP to HTTPS, I would like to propose establishing a deprecation plan for HTTP without security. Broadly speaking, this plan would entail limiting new features to secure contexts, followed by gradually removing legacy features from insecure contexts. Having an overall program for HTTP deprecation makes a clear statement to the web community that the time for plaintext is over — it tells the world that the new web uses HTTPS, so if you want to use new things, you need to provide security.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • HP: We’re not leaving the public cloud

      Several days after HP seemed to announce that it was going to stop offering public cloud services, the company is now stating that it will continue to offer its OpenStack-powered Helion public cloud.

    • Comcast has contributed 36K lines of code to a massive open source project called OpenStack

      Philly became the center of the action for those who use a massive open source project called OpenStack last month.

      Comcast hosted one of the OpenStack community’s regular meetups, drawing more than 150 developers from companies like Rackspace, Time Warner and Red Hat to The Hub in Rittenhouse Square for the two-day event.

  • CMS

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing

    • An Open Source Pinewood Derby Track

      There are a lot of reasons to consider reproducing. Tax breaks are near the top of the list, and a bizarre obligation to ensure the survival of the species following closely behind. The pinewood derby, though… Where else are you going to get a chance to spend hours polishing axles and weighing down bits of wood so they can roll faster?

    • The makerspace is the next open source frontier

      In this brave new world of heterogeneous projects that combine hardware, software, printed, cloud, and other pieces, we are going to see an cacophony of different tools for building these different parts of an idea and project. We have GitHub for collaborating around code, Thingiverse for 3D models, Trello for project management and coordination, Moqups and Balsamiq for user interface design, specific toolkits for building drivers and integrating with sensors, and more.

    • Open-source streetlamps from old soda bottles are making streets safer for women

      In the tiny barrio of San Luis, perched precipitously on the hills above Bogotá, a hundred university students are hard at work. Split into 10 groups, they glue, drill and screw things together to make 50 low-cost street lights.

      The lights’ beauty lies in their simplicity: A 3-watt LED lamp is connected to a controller and a battery pack, which is powered by a small solar panel. The light fixture’s protective casing is an old plastic soda bottle. Each lamp costs around 176,000 Colombian pesos ($70) to build, and nothing to run. Parts are sourced locally and the battery can power the lamp for three consecutive nights without charging. Once completed, the students install the lights throughout the neighbourhood, brightening dimly lit alleyways and dark clearings.

    • Open Data

  • Programming

    • Git Success Stories and Tips from Ceph Creator Sage Weil

      Git has changed the way that software is built — including the Ceph open source distributed storage platform, says Ceph Creator Sage Weil. Ceph has used the Git revision control system for seven years, since it switched from SVN. It has changed the project’s work flow and how they think about code.

      “Instead of thinking in files and lines, you think in flow of changes. Instead of having a single repository that everyone feeds from and into, everyone now has their own repository, their own branches. The meaning of branch changed,” said Weil, Ceph principal architect at Red Hat. “Everything just fell in place, as if the people who designed it really knew software development at scale.”

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • 32-Bit Integers and Why Old Computers Matter

      The number 256 is what broke the original arcade version of Pac-Man. As a game with no proper exit condition, Pac-Man relied on faith that players would eventually get tired of it before the 256th level. This was reasonable given that every single level after the 20th was just a repeat of level 20. But video games lend themselves to obsession like few things, even in 1980, so of course some players took it as a challenge—a test of endurance and concentration. Those that made it to 256 were in for a strange sight, what computer scientists would call “undefined behavior.” This was the result: ​

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Dear Apple: Your upgrade policy sucks

      While changes in technology are generally a mark of progress, they are not always immediately for the better. Certain hardware and software vendors would do well to understand that reality — Apple, for instance.

      Apple has long enjoyed a unique position in the marketplace in that it controls both the hardware and software running on its various platforms. This tight integration has allowed the company to produce some of the most stable and functional computer hardware ever made. This has also allowed Apple to make dramatic changes in both hardware and software without appearing to care a whit for its users, often condemning them to vast frustrations for no logical reason.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • In the Middle East, Bet on a Winner (Iran!)

      Think of it as the American half-century in the Middle East: from August 17, 1953, when a CIA oil coup brought down democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and installed the Shah as Washington’s man in Tehran, to May 1, 2003, when George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of southern California. (The planes from that aircraft carrier had only recently dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq.) There, standing under a White House-produced banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” the president dramatically announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and hailed “the arrival of a new era.”

    • Emails Reveal Discord Over Blackwater Charges

      WASHINGTON — As prosecutors put the finishing touches on the 2008 indictment of Blackwater security contractors for a deadly shooting in Iraq, the F.B.I. agents leading the investigation became convinced that political appointees in the Justice Department were intentionally undermining the case, internal emails show.

    • Former Blackwater guards sentenced in ‘staggering’ massacre of unarmed Iraqis

      Three former employees of the US private military contractor once known as Blackwater were sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday and a fourth received a life sentence, closing a sordid chapter of the Iraq conflict relating to the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad.

    • Ex-Blackwater Guards Sentenced to Long Prison Terms in 2007 Killings of Iraqi Civilians

      One by one, four former Blackwater security contractors wearing blue jumpsuits and leg irons stood before a federal judge on Monday and spoke publicly for the first time since a deadly 2007 shooting in Iraq.

    • Florida Ex-Senator Pursues Claims of Saudi Ties to Sept. 11 Attacks

      The episode could have been a chapter from the thriller written by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida about a shadowy Saudi role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

      A top F.B.I. official unexpectedly arranges a meeting at Dulles International Airport outside Washington with Mr. Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after he has pressed for information on a bureau terrorism inquiry. Mr. Graham, a Democrat, is then hustled off to a clandestine location, where he hopes for a breakthrough in his long pursuit of ties between leading Saudis and the Sept. 11 hijackers.

    • Frustrated with US meddling, Latin America seeks its own path

      President Obama is in Panama this weekend for the Summit of the Americas, where he’ll meet with regional leaders who have grown increasingly determined to assert autonomy from the US.

    • Why the details of the Iran deal don’t matter

      At heart, this is a fight over what to do about Iran’s challenge to U.S. leadership in the Middle East and the threat that Iranian geopolitical ambitions pose to U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    • Terrorism Case Renews Debate Over Drone Hits

      A Texas-born man suspected of being an operative for Al Qaeda stood before a federal judge in Brooklyn this month. Two years earlier, his government debated whether he should be killed by a drone strike in Pakistan.

      The denouement in the hunt for the man, Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was arrested last year in Pakistan based on intelligence provided by the United States, came after a yearslong debate inside the government about whether to kill an American citizen overseas without trial — an extraordinary step taken only once before, when the Central Intelligence Agency killed the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

    • The world of threats to the US is an illusion

      When Americans look out at the world, we see a swarm of threats. China seems resurgent and ambitious. Russia is aggressive. Iran menaces our allies. Middle East nations we once relied on are collapsing in flames. Latin American leaders sound steadily more anti-Yankee. Terror groups capture territory and commit horrific atrocities. We fight Ebola with one hand while fending off Central American children with the other.

      In fact, this world of threats is an illusion. The United States has no potent enemies. We are not only safe, but safer than any big power has been in all of modern history.

      Geography is our greatest protector. Wide oceans separate us from potential aggressors. Our vast homeland is rich and productive. No other power on earth is blessed with this security.

    • Drone Victims Take Germany to Court for Abetting U.S. Murders

      Andreas Schüller is an attorney on the staff of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. He is the lead attorney on a suit being brought by ECCHR and Reprieve against the German government on behalf of three Yemeni survivors of a U.S. drone strike. The case will be heard May 27th in Cologne.

      Their suit argues that it is illegal under German law for the German government to allow the U.S. air base at Ramstein to be used for drone murders abroad. The suit comes after the passage of a resolution in the European Parliament in February 2014 urging European nations to “oppose and ban the practice of extrajudicial targeted killings” and to “ensure that the Member States, in conformity with their legal obligations, do not perpetrate unlawful targeted killings or facilitate such killings by other states.”

      I’ve always thought of drone murders as illegal under the laws of the countries where the murders happen, as well as under the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact. I asked Schüller: Is your suit seeking prosecution for murder where (or in one of the places where) the act is committed from a distance?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A Lot Of Bottled Water Comes From Drought-Stricken California

      California’s in the middle of an epic drought — but that hasn’t stopped bottled water production in the state. Even as residents face mandatory cutbacks and fields lie fallow, companies continue pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of water every year into plastic bottles — sometimes straight from a municipal water supply.

    • Watch: Amid Drought, California Water Virtually Draining Away

      In California, alfalfa production has been scrutinized at a time when both exports of the crop and public awareness of the drought are growing. The expanding global dairy industry, particularly in China, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates, is driving demand for alfalfa as animal feed. Much of the alfalfa that the U.S. exports is grown in water-scarce western states.

  • Finance

    • Occupation at University of Amsterdam Challenges the Logic of Market-Driven Education

      When students kicked in the door of the main administrative building, the Maagdenuis, at the University of Amsterdam on February 25, the “New University” – or “De Nieuwe Universiteit” – movement introduced a new aesthetic dimension of protest.

      The Maagdenhuis occupation, a protest against the financialization of higher education and against the concentration of decision-making power at the university, disrupted the everyday flow of doing, changing the normal organization of human sense experience on campus. By taking a building and reorganizing human activity inside, with emphasis on dialogue, deliberation and shared decision-making, occupiers created new aesthetic conditions necessary for a new politics, as philosopher Jacques Rancière, who recently visited the Maagdenhuis to show solidarity with UvA students, suggests.

  • Privacy

    • Even if the Patriot Act expires, the worst surveillance will carry on
    • Amnesty International takes UK government to European Court of Human Rights over mass surveillance

      Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International have announced today they are taking the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights over its indiscriminate mass surveillance practices.

    • A New Era at the Tor Project

      Andrew Lewman, our current Executive Director, is leaving The Tor Project to take a position at an Internet services company. While at Tor, Andrew was passionate about using our tools to help people from diverse backgrounds and points of view benefit from online privacy. We thank Andrew for his contributions and wish him well.

    • Police want to keep surveillance tech secret

      Time for law enforcement to come clean on how stingrays spy on Americans’ cellphones

    • Forget spying, now the NSA wants your password list

      The NSA isn’t interested in a sneaky back door into your smartphone or computer any more, it just wants you to leave the front door wide open. While arguments continue around just what the National Security Agency can and can’t get access to – dragging more than one big tech name into the controversy – the spy organization’s chief is suggesting a far more blunt approach: in effect, handing over the keys to encryption upfront.

    • CISPA Is Back With A Vengeance

      First introduced in the House of Representatives in 2011, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is once again back in play and is being considered for legislative action this month. Much of the same concerns that accompanied its introduction in 2011 remain specifically that it is a blank check for cybersurveillance dressed up as a bill to promote cybersecurity.

      The earlier version of both SOPA and CISPA were defeated due in part to staunch opposition from numerous corners of the internet. CISPA initially contained language that included intellectual property issues as falling under the act making it essentially SOPA-light.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Power of Lies

      Lincoln did not think blacks were the equals of whites.

    • The Boston Marathon Show Trial

      Tsarnaev’s attorney knew that evidence would play no role in the case and focused on trying to save Dzhokhar from a death sentence by blaming the older brother who was killed by police. Perhaps Dzhokhar’s attorney remembered what happened to attorney Lynne Stewart who was sentenced to prison for representing a client for whom the government only wanted a pro forma representation.

    • The Nasty Blowback from America’s Wars

      Rowley warned Mueller that launching unjustified war would prove counterproductive in various ways. One blowback she highlighted was that the rationale being applied to allow preemptive strikes abroad could migrate back home, “fostering a more permissive attitude toward shootings by law enforcement officers in this country.” Tragically, the recent spate of murders by police has proved Rowley right.

    • My Labia Will Send Logan Airport TSA Thug Melendy A Postcard

      TSA thug Melendy got all up the side between my thigh and my labia — four times.

    • Autistic 11-year-old arrested for leaving class early: “He slammed me down, and then he handcuffed me”s

      An autistic sixth grader in Lynchburg, Virginia was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, PRI’s Susan Ferriss reports.

    • The Real Arab Spring Is Happening in Israel

      The success of the Joint List is an example for the wider Arab world, says Ayman Odeh, its leader. Odeh, a 40-year-old lawyer from Haifa, is now one of the country’s best-known politicians. He won widespread accolades for his calm, reasoned response to being verbally abused on television by Avigdor Lieberman, a former foreign minister. “We live in the Middle East, in an era when people are being killed because they have a different ethnicity, religion or ideology. We have a different message: to accept differences, and work side by side to achieve our goals. We hope our example will affect all the Arab world,” he said.

      [...]

      The model is Martin Luther King, says Odeh. King and his supporters marched to Washington in 1963, demanding jobs and freedom. Odeh has prepared a 10-year plan to close the civic and economic gap between Israel’s Jewish and Arab population. “We intend to march to Jerusalem, to raise awareness for our 10-year plan and to demand democracy and justice for all.”

    • Why Does WaPo Protect Identities of Cops Who Tased a Shackled, Mentally Ill Woman Until She Died?

      The Washington Post knows who gave Natasha McKenna repeated high-voltage shocks just before she suffered a fatal heart attack–but it isn’t telling its readers.

      The Washington Post (4/11/15) ran a troubling story about an African-American woman who died after Fairfax County, Virginia, sheriff’s deputies repeatedly used a taser on her while she was already in shackles. The deputies administered four 50,000-volt shocks to Natasha McKenna, a prisoner at the Fairfax County jail who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, in an effort to force her into a chair for transport; minutes later, her heart stopped.

    • UAE Gave $1 Million to NYC Police Foundation; Money Aided ‘Investigations’

      The New York City Police Foundation received a $1 million donation from the government of the United Arab Emirates, according to 2012 tax records, the same amount the foundation transferred to the NYPD Intelligence Division’s International Liaison Program that year, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

      A 2012 Schedule A document filed by the New York City Police Foundation showed a list of its largest donors, which included several major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase and Barclays Capital — but also a line item for the “Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.” The Intercept obtained a copy of the Schedule A document, which is not intended for public disclosure and only shows donors above the threshold of donating $1 million over four years.

    • John Legend launches campaign to end mass incarceration

      John Legend has launched a campaign to end mass incarceration.

      The Grammy-winning singer announced the multiyear initiative, FREE AMERICA, on Monday. He will visit and perform at a correctional facility on Thursday in Austin, Texas, where he also will be part of a press conference with state legislators to discuss Texas’ criminal justice system.

    • The Abuse of Satire

      My career—I guess I can officially call it that now—was not my idea. When my editor, Jim Andrews, recruited me out during my junior year in college and gave me the job I still hold, it wasn’t clear to me what he was up to. Inexplicably, he didn’t seem concerned that I was short on the technical skills normally associated with creating a comic strip—it was my perspective he was interested in, my generational identity. He saw the sloppy draftsmanship as a kind of cartoon vérité, dispatches from the front, raw and subversive.

      Why were they so subversive? Well, mostly because I didn’t know any better. My years in college had given me the completely false impression that there were no constraints, that it was safe for an artist to comment on volatile cultural and political issues in public. In college, there’s no down side. In the real world, there is, but in the euphoria of being recognized for anything, you don’t notice it at first. Indeed, one of the nicer things about youthful cluelessness is that it’s so frequently confused with courage.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Legal Responses May Be Imminent in Net Neutrality Face-off

      Back in March, the FCC’s 400-page net neutrality order arrived, and made waves because of the agency’s vote to reclassify broadband as a regulated telecommunications service. The FCC argued that it created “clear and enforceable rules” to protect consumers, but broadband providers and others bristled at the regulation proposals.

      Over this past weekend, the net neutrality rule was published in the Federal Register, the daily journal of U.S. government initiatives, and legal action from those opposing it could be imminent.

    • FCC fires the starting gun on net neutrality legal tussles

      The move follows the historic decision by the FCC to impose more stringent net neutrality rules than anyone had expected in a vote at the end of February which saw the motion pass by three votes to two.

    • Hollywood Seeks Net Neutrality Exceptions to Block Pirates

      The Motion Picture Association has written to Brazil’s Justice Minister seeking exceptions to the country’s fledgling “Internet Constitution”. In a submission to the government the MPA says that the Marco Civil’s current wording on net neutrality deprives courts of the opportunity to order the blocking of ‘pirate’ sites.

    • 6 Stupid Reasons Actual People Are Scared Of Net Neutrality

      According to the most popular British talk show host on American premium cable, net neutrality is one of the most important regulations for the future of telecommunications (and, by extension, all of humanity under the age of 50). Net neutrality is about making sure your ISP can’t control what you view on the Internet and how fast you view it — or, as the aforementioned talk show host put it, “Preventing Cable Company Fuckery.” How could anyone possibly be against something as basic as that? The answer, as the following reactions to net neutrality prove, is “by being hilariously stupid.”

04.13.15

Links 13/4/2015: Linux 4.0 Released; A Look at Antergos 2015.04.12

Posted in News Roundup at 11:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Real Reason Open Source Startups Fail

    The recent news around Nebula shutting its doors has stirred speculation that OpenStack startups are struggling because of the state of the OpenStack market. There is even a piece claiming that the OpenStack dream is on “life support.”

    This couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that winning in open source requires a playbook that is drastically different from one that most VCs investing in technology today are used to.

  • 3 best practices for bootstrapping an open source business

    I’ve felt this tension firsthand. My company, PencilBlue, an open source content management system, was instantly dismissed by a well-known venture capitalist because, as he put it, “No website creation tool makes money unless it completely gets rid of the need for developers.” This is someone who made seed investments in multiple household-name tech startups, and he had no clue that more than 70% of all websites are created by developers and that the $21 billion web development industry is ruled by open source platforms.

    That open source startups are hard to find in the investment-first ecosystem is not surprising, because they’re usually started by people who actually build the product. Most of the time, seeking early stage investment for an open source product doesn’t make financial sense. On the other hand, there’s much to be gained from the business and marketing knowledge in local startup communities, so being sequestered from them can put open source developers at a disadvantage.

  • Events

  • CMS

    • Presidential candidate website tech, compared

      Over the next year, political pundits will spend far too much time dissecting the horse race, scandals (real or imagined), the electoral college and more polls than you can shake a stick at. I’m doing none of that. I’m just looking at websites.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Pivotal sets the stage for open-source in-memory computing

        Opening up the code could give enterprise customers more input into what new features are added into future versions. For Pivotal, the move provides an entry to those corporate clients that have adopted policies of using open-source software whenever possible, said Roman Shaposhnik, Pivotal’s director of open source.

        The company also hopes the software, released under the name Project Geode, will find a wider user base, one looking for big data analysis technologies speedier than Hadoop or Spark, Shaposhnik said.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Git and GitHub for open source documentation

      We use git extensively for documentation in OpenStack so that we can “treat the docs like the code”—and I’m seeing this trend many places especially in the Write the Docs community.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Hacked French TV network admits “blunder” that exposed YouTube password

      The head of the French TV network that suspended broadcasting following last week’s hack attack has confirmed the service exposed its own passwords during a TV interview, but said the gaffe came only after the breach.

      “We don’t hide the fact that this is a blunder,” the channel’s director general Yves Bigot, told the AFP news service.

      The exposure came during an interview a rival TV service broadcast on the TV5Monde attack. During the questioning, a TV5Monde journalist sat in front of several scraps of paper hanging on a window. One of them showed the password of for the network’s YouTube account. As Ars reported last week, the pass code was “lemotdepassedeyoutube,” which translates in English to “the password of YouTube.”

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

    • From A to Z (Asteroids to Zombies), the British Just Want the Facts

      Government secrecy has long been a hallmark of Britain, where neither laws nor traditions made it easy to obtain the documents and records that are the underpinnings of any bureaucracy. But a decade ago, the doors were swung wide open to allow the sunshine of public scrutiny into agencies, bureaus and councils, and the result has been both gratifying and slightly alarming.

      While Britain’s Freedom of Information law has established itself as a potent tool to scrutinize the work of public authorities and hold those in power accountable, it has also had some expensive consequences — and, in some cases, revealed the absurdity of public whim.

      The hundreds of thousands of requests that have been received at various levels of government in the last decade have not only been time-consuming for agencies and councils, they have also proved extremely costly.

      Such, though, is the side effect of transparency, say the proponents of open government, who also argue that the benefits outweigh the burdens.

      “What people often forget is just how much F.O.I. saves money, because it exposes wasteful and extravagant spending,” said Paul Gibbons, a freedom of information campaigner and blogger. “Just one example: a local council in Scotland was spending thousands every year sending a delegation to Japan for a flower festival. Once F.O.I. came into force, they quickly realized they couldn’t justify doing that.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Snow-Capped Mountains and Rushing Rivers, but No Water to Drink in Nepal’s Capital

      Despite having among the highest water availability per capita in the world and holding about 2.7 percent of the world’s total fresh water reserves, Nepal suffers from a chronic water shortage.

      Set against a decade of political turbulence, acute mismanagement of water supplies and large in-migration from villages to the capital Kathmandu, the less socio-economically advantaged half of Nepal is increasingly left to fend for itself to gain access to clean water.

      In Kathmandu, the Nepalese government’s Central Bureau of Statistics shows that one out of five households do not have a domestic water source, while two-thirds live with a water supply which most probably would fail the standard for being ‘clean and safe.’

  • Finance

    • Dear Apple, Microsoft and Google, you owe Australia billions!

      As one watched representatives of the three most important IT companies in the world being grilled by an Australian Senate committee on tax avoidance last week, it soon became obvious that the whole show was a farce. The corporations have been fleecing Australia of billions of dollars in tax revenues for years and successive governments have been either powerless or unwilling to do anything.

      In the revenue leeching stakes, Apple is by far the worst offender followed by Microsoft, with Google bringing up the rear only by the virtue of its Australian R&D activities.

      The contempt with which all three companies view the Australian Government and the Australian people was obvious by the personnel they chose to front the Senate committee.

    • Dollar’s buying power plummets in first day of “official” WoW gold trading

      For most of World of Warcraft’s history, the only way to buy in-game gold with real currency was to go through one of many gray market third-party services (which technically goes against Blizzard’s terms of service for the game). That was true until yesterday, when Blizzard introduced a $20 game time token that can be sold for gold at the in-game auction house on North American servers (European servers will get the feature at a later date). While the real-world price of those tokens is fixed at $20, the gold price is “determined dynamically based on supply and demand,” as Blizzard puts it.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Noam Chomsky on the New York Times’ Media Bias

      A front-page article is devoted to a flawed story about a campus rape in the journal Rolling Stone, exposed in the leading academic journal of media critique. So severe is this departure from journalistic integrity that it is also the subject of the lead story in the business section, with a full inside page devoted to the continuation of the two reports. The shocked reports refer to several past crimes of the press: a few cases of fabrication, quickly exposed, and cases of plagiarism (“too numerous to list”). The specific crime of Rolling Stone is “lack of skepticism,” which is “in many ways the most insidious” of the three categories.

  • Privacy

    • ​Securing the web once and for all: The Let’s Encrypt Project
    • European court challenge to UK surveillance

      Rights groups have asked the European Court of Human Rights to rule on the legality of the UK’s large-scale surveillance regime.

      Amnesty International, Liberty and Privacy International filed a legal complaint with the court today.

      The scale of the surveillance carried out by GCHQ has been revealed by US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Brazil builds undersea internet cable to protect online privacy

      Angered by Edward Snowden’s revelations on the wiretapping habits of tri-lettered American agencies, Brazil is taking the internet into its own hands — and giving Uncle Sam the middle finger. Right now most internet traffic between South America and Europe travels through the overly inquisitive US, but that’s about to change. Next year, Brazil’s Telebrás and Spain’s IslaLink will begin laying £120 million worth of undersea internet cable to span the 5,600km of Atlantic Ocean between Fortaleza, Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal. The Americans can just follow their allies’ activities on Facebook like everyone else.

    • Facebook admits it tracks non-users, but denies claims it breaches EU privacy law

      Social network claims privacy report commissioned by the Belgian privacy watchdog ‘gets it wrong multiple times’ over what Facebook does with user data

    • NSA dreams of smartphones with “split” crypto keys protecting user data

      The approach is only one of several options being studied by the White House. One alternative under consideration would have a judge direct a company to set up a mirror account so that law enforcement officials conducting a criminal investigation could read text messages shortly after they are sent. To obtain encrypted photos, the judge could order the company to back up the suspect’s data to a server while the phone is turned on and its contents are unencrypted.

  • Civil Rights

    • U.S. Air Force Fires General Who Threatened Airmen With ‘Treason’

      Three months ago, Maj. Gen. James Post — the deputy chief of Air Combat Command — warned airmen that talking to Congress about the A-10 Warthog is an act of “treason.”

      On April 10, the U.S. Air Force announced it had canned Post from his job.

      To be sure, the flying branch doesn’t like the A-10 and is locked in a battle with legislators over the attack plane’s future. But it certainly didn’t like Post making veiled threats. He made the comments during a January gathering of airmen at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

    • Dog Owners Threatened With $750,000 Fine Over Missing Dog Posters

      A D.C. dog owner did what anyone with a missing pet would do. He posted fliers — but then, he says, police threatened him with a $750,000 fine.

    • Access to justice a greater concern than free healthcare – poll

      The public is more concerned about access to justice than free healthcare, according to a poll commissioned by lawyers campaigning to reverse cuts to legal aid.

      The findings from a YouGov poll have been released as the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats vie to pledge more and more funding for the NHS.

    • Deputy who killed man after mistaking gun for Taser is an insurance exec who pays to play cop

      The reserve Tulsa County Sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot and killed a man last week when he thought he had pulled his Taser, is part of a group of wealthy donors who make large contributions to the department for the privilege of playing police officer.

      According to Tulsa World, Robert Bates, 73, who made the fatal mistake that cost a man his life, is a local insurance company executive who has donated multiple vehicles, weapons, and stun guns to the Sheriff’s Office since becoming a reserve deputy in 2008.

    • [Old] Shane Todd’s family says noose and towel used in U.S. engineer’s hanging death DESTROYED by police

      Police in Singapore destroyed two pieces of evidence tied to the death of Shane Todd, whose body was found in his apartment there in June 2012, according to the American engineer’s family.

      The 31-year-old’s parents, Rick and Mary Todd, have for months been demanding the Singapore government return the hand-made noose and towel around their son’s neck when his body was discovered by his girlfriend hanging from his bathroom door.

    • [Old] Experts: Engineer found dead didn’t write suicide notes

      Ever since the body of American engineer was found hanging in his Singapore apartment in June 2012, his mother Mary Todd has maintained that the five typewritten suicide notes found at the scene were not written by her son.

      “My son did not write those suicide notes,” Mary Todd has repeated to anyone who would listen.

    • [Old] Singapore gov’t destroyed evidence in US engineer’s death

      Two pieces of evidence central to the death of 31-year-old American engineer Shane Todd — whose body was found in his Singapore apartment in June, 2012 — have been destroyed by police on the island nation, according to an official letter sent to the Todd family lawyer earlier this month.

    • [Old] Shame In Singapore: If Edward Snowden Betrayed America, America Has Betrayed Shane Todd

      I can’t stop thinking about the strange circumstances surrounding the tragic death of a promising young American electric engineer in Singapore two years ago.

      His name was Shane Todd and his story is a cautionary tale for sanctimonious ideologues like Edward Snowden.

      Unlike Snowden, Todd defended America’s secrets and doing so may have cost him his life.

      While local authorities in Singapore claim that Shane committed suicide, his family is convinced he was murdered. For better or worse, so am I.

      Rather than recapitulating the circumstances surrounding Todd’s death, I would refer readers to an enormously compelling piece that appeared last year in the Financial Times about Todd’s death.

      Ironically, the only evidence I can add is taken from a classified diplomatic cable sent to the Central Intelligence Agency about seven years ago from a federal export controls official in China. The cable, which was made public by Wikileaks, reviews an application from a Chinese company for a license to export the technology that Shane had worked on in Singapore – a metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial system for producing epitaxial materials like gallium nitride (GaN), a semiconductor circuit technology that offers disruptive capabilities in efficient microwave power generation.

    • [Old] Murder, international coverup alleged in new book

      “Mom, I might be paranoid, but I have the feeling that they are threatening my life if I don’t stay,” Shane said. “I am so naive. Coming to Singapore was the worst mistake of my life.”

      Just before his planned return to the United States, he was found hanged in his apartment. He already had a job lined up in the United States and had his family postpone celebrating Father’s Day and his brother’s birthday. He was going to be in a wedding in the summer.

      Rick and Mary Todd flew to Singapore, where they met with police. The official account of Shane’s apparent suicide soon unraveled.

    • [Old] 48 Hours: Did a son die protecting American secrets?

      The Singapore police told the Todds that Shane had hanged himself but, almost from the start, they did not believe it. Aside from having a new job, Shane had made summer plans with his brothers and had even asked his grandmother if he could use her car and apartment in the interim before he started his new job. He’d queried his future employer about the company policy regarding vacation time and publishing opportunities, Mary said.

      Even as Rick Todd staggered off the plane in Denver, devastated by the news of his son’s death, Mary and her sons already had hatched a plan to fly to Singapore immediately. There’s no doubt that the Todds had an advantage given that Rick flew for a major airline and the entire family had passports at the ready. Seemingly overnight, they were in Singapore asking pointed questions of police officials.

    • [Old] China, Hacking, And Murder
    • [Old] A Family Battles to Prove Their Son Died an American Hero in 48 HOURS: SPIES, LIES & SECRETS

      Peter Van Sant and 48 Hours return to a family’s quest to prove their son was murdered and did not commit suicide as officials in Singapore say, and they’re determined to clear his name in an updated edition of “Spies, Lies & Secrets,” to be rebroadcast Saturday, August 30 (10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

    • [Old] Did a son die protecting American secrets?
    • [Old] Hard Drive: An American engineer’s death in Singapore raised disturbing questions

      With the sheer determination of a mother on a mission, I made a beeline for Shane’s bathroom. As I looked into the bathroom, I was perplexed and shocked. Nothing I saw matched IO Khal’s description. “Oh my gosh, John, come quickly, you’ve got to see this,” I yelled.

      John ran to me and we both began to exclaim, “Where are the bolts, the ropes, and the pulleys? Why is the toilet not across from the door as Khal described it?” Perplexed, we ran our hands over the marble walls searching for holes that might have been patched, looking for anything that would back up what Khal had told us. Nothing!…

    • [Old] Hard Drive III: Shocking reason we were told Congressional investigation was unlikely

      A week and a half after we returned to Montana, we discovered through various media sources that Minister Shanmugam was still in Washington D.C. and was scheduled to meet with Senator Baucus, Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Eric Holder, and various other government officials, including Arizona Senator John McCain.

      Prior to these meetings, USA Today cited Sen. Baucus, emphasizing that the SPF and Singaporean government “have been less than forthcoming” in the Shane Todd case and that evidence he had seen so far raised “very, very strong questions” and “deep concerns about national security.” …

    • [Old] Family investigates ‘whistleblower’ engineer’s mysterious death

      Mary Todd is coming to New York in her quest for justice.

      The mother of Dr. Shane Truman Todd, the American engineer found hanging in his Singapore apartment two years ago, has co-written a book, “Hard Drive: A Family’s Fight Against Three Countries,” with Shane’s cousin, Dr. Christina Villegas.

      The California women claim Shane was murdered and that authorities ruled his death a suicide for political reasons.

      “He had expressed fear for his life,” Villegas told me. “We don’t know who is responsible for his murder, but all three countries are guilty of destruction of evidence and the coverup.”

      Villegas, who is coming with Todd to New York on Sept. 5, said, “The US State Department is fully aiding the perversion of justice. As soon as John Kerry met with Singapore Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam, the FBI lost all interest in the case.”

04.12.15

Links 12/4/2015: Linux 4.0 Imminent, Semplice 7 Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 3:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The rebirth of Free Software Magazine

    When I started Free Software Magazine, over 10 years ago, it was a very different world. Magazines still mattered, Facebook was a primitive site for university students, Digg was about to become a huge new site (before disappearing a few years later), and… did I mention that Magazines still mattered?

    Fast-forward to 2015: it has been 11 years. While I can say that for the first time I have contributed to an exciting free software project with a few thousands lines of code, Hotplate — and believe me, I’ve been keeping busy — I was forced to put Free Software Magazine in hiatus in order to complete Hotplate.

  • Events

    • ownCloud Meetup to test devices in Berin

      Coming Wednesday, it’s time for the monthly Berlin ownCloud meetup again. Last month, we wanted to play with some little development boards, install ownCloud on them and see what they could do. But we had over a dozen new participants join, turning the meetup mostly in a ‘how to get an ownCloud development environment up and running’ session.

  • Programming

    • Apply agile methodologies to upstream development environments…. if you can.

      In consequence, it would not surprise me if we hear more and more about “corporate development methodologies” (a.k.a. agile) vs. “upstream development methodologies” (a.k.a. FLOSS).

      Scrum, XP, Kanban -ish fans will need to face those challenges and find solutions in order to succeed in open collaboration environments. In the same way, based on the increasing influence that companies are gaining in these ecosystems, FLOSS methodologies in a few years will differ from what we knew 10 years ago.

Leftovers

  • Politics

    • Obama: Clinton would make an ‘excellent president’

      A day before Hillary Clinton is expected to announce her second run for the White House, President Barack Obama said she would make an “excellent president.”

      “She was a formidable candidate in 2008,” Obama said in response to a question at a news conference in Panama. “She was a great supporter of mine in the general election. She was an outstanding secretary of state. She is my friend. I think she would be an excellent president.”

      Obama and Clinton have remained in touch since she left the State Department in 2013 where she served as Obama’s secretary of state in the first term.

      [...]

      “Not only have I run my last election, but I am not in the business of prognosticating future elections,” he said.
      Join The Conversation

      McClatchy Washington Bureau is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what’s in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on the issues of the day, and ask that you refrain from profanity, hate speech, personal comments and remarks that are off point. Thank you for taking the time to offer your thoughts.

    • Rand Paul Is Not a Libertarian. He’s Just Running for President

      Rand Paul has in fact inherited much of his father’s popularity among the grassroots and youth activists of his party. I would tend to agree with most political insiders that he is one of the leading contenders for the Republican nomination. However, I can’t help but wonder just how long and to what effect his disingenuous charade can possibly continue. At what point do his key voting blocs stop and realize what his actions are really designed to accomplish? Which is to trick them into electing an unremarkable first term Republican senator as America’s first “Libertarian” president.

    • How the KCIA was born – in deep shadows

      But my promise wasn’t kept. I stepped down as KCIA director in January 1963. The military government relinquished power to a civilian elected-government. But the KCIA kept its authority to investigate and has been blamed for abusing and politicizing its power many times since. It is still trying to hold onto the authority it promised to hand over. The motto that I drafted has also been damaged. I do feel responsible for its abuse of power and misdeeds as its founder.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Total control: is Monsanto unstoppable?

      Political lobbying, on an international scale, has intensified. There is much to play for. Other biotech giants are involved – Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, BASF – but Monsanto is at the head of the pack, pushing hard into Europe and Asia and, with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, into Africa too.

  • Security

    • Calls to make software designers liable for security weakness

      In December 2014, Google released information about a vulnerability that researchers working on its Project Zero bug-hunting initiative had discovered in Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 operating system. Google had raised the issue privately with Microsoft three months previously, but Microsoft had failed to address the issue within Project Zero’s 90-day deadline.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Russian naval ship evacuates over 300 people stranded in Yemen

      The Russian Navy vessel Priazovye has helped to evacuate 308 people from war-torn Yemen. The Russian Defense Ministry stated citizens from 19 countries had been rescued, including Russian, Ukrainian, US and Yemini nationals.

    • CIA: Opponents of Iran’s initial nuclear agreement are being ‘disingenuous’

      Opponents of Iran’s initial agreement to curb its nuclear program are being “disingenuous” when they say the deal could still allow the Middle Eastern state to build nuclear weapons, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency said on Tuesday.

    • CIA director attacks critics of Iran deal as ‘wholly disingenuous’

      CIA Director John Brennan reportedly says the preliminary framework around the nuclear deal with Iran does what had once seemed impossible, calling some critics of the agreement “wholly disingenuous” and expressing surprise at the Iranians’ concessions.

    • CIA Director: We’re Winning the War on Terror, But It Will Never End

      Last night, Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan participated in a question-and-answer session at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. The first thirty-seven minutes consisted of an unusually probing exchange between Brennan and Harvard professor Graham Allison (full disclosure: Graham is a former boss of mine). Most notably, between 19:07 and 29:25 in the video, Allison pressed Brennan repeatedly about whether the United States is winning the war on terrorism and why the number of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups has only increased since 9/11: “There seem to be more of them than when we started…How are we doing?”

    • CIA Director Says the War on Terror May Never End
    • With a book to promote, Judy Miller succeeds in trolling enemies about Iraq War
    • With a book to promote, Judy Miller succeeds in trolling enemies about Iraq War

      America’s most famous former spy and a fallen-star New York Times writer have started a new round of smacktalk over a topic that has 2003 written all over it: Who’s to blame for the U.S. invasion of Iraq?

      Judy Miller and Valerie Plame Wilson have re-litigated the question of war over the past week in op-ed pages and on Facebook and Twitter. It became personal.

    • With a book to promote, Judy Miller succeeds in trolling enemies about Iraq War

      These revelations come from veteran New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. It tells how special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rigged the 2007 perjury trial of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, in the Valerie Plame case, and inadvertently condemned thousands of Americans to be killed and maimed needlessly in Iraq.

    • When Journalists Join the Cover-ups

      As embarrassing as the Judith Miller case was for the New York Times, the fiasco underscores a more troubling development that strikes near the heart of American democracy – the press corps’ gradual retreat from the principle of skepticism on national security issues to career-boosting “patriotism.”

    • Judith Miller tries, and ultimately fails, to defend her flawed Iraq reporting

      Then she misused that same influence and prestige. So she doesn’t get to ridicule all those who initially took her Times stories seriously, as the United States launched a war that killed 4,500 U.S. service members and left an Iraqi toll many times higher.

    • Judith Miller’s Blame-Shifting Memoir

      On April 3, former New York Times journalist Judith Miller published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths: Officials Didn’t Lie, and I Wasn’t Fed a Line.” If this sounds a bit defensive, Miller has tons to be defensive about.

      In the article, Miller claims, “false narratives [about what she did as a New York Times reporter] deserve, at last, to be retired.” The article appears to be the initial salvo in a major attempt at self-rehabilitation and, coincidentally, comes just as her new book, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, is to be published today.

      In reviewing Miller’s book, her “mainstream media” friends are not likely to mention the stunning conclusion reached recently by the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other respected groups that the Iraq War, for which she was lead drum majorette, killed one million people. One might think that, in such circumstances – and with bedlam reigning in Iraq and the wider neighborhood – a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, so to speak, might prompt Miller to keep her head down for a while more.

    • Valerie Plame Blasts Ex-NY Times Reporter Judith Miller’s ‘Pathetic’ Iraq War Column

      “You were just cheering from the sidelines,” ex-CIA operative says about Miller’s role in helping build support for the Iraq War

      Former CIA operative Valerie Plame took to social media to criticize former New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s recent column that deflected her role in ginning up support for the Iraq War.

    • Judith Miller Clings to Her Own Stubborn Myths

      Judith Miller recently popped out of the Fox News bubble for a quick jaunt to the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the home base for John Bolton, Max Boot, and other neo-con hawks, to give her forthcoming book a little free advertising. In the process she attempts to whitewash her role as an influential pro-war voice in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

      Her April 3, 2015 statement predictably follows the same party line as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush. She strongly defends herself against those who claim her reportage in the run-up to the war consciously fanned the flames of pro-war sentiment prior to the start of “shock and awe” on March 19, 2003. She claims she was a victim of faulty intelligence and “everybody” got it wrong about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. So why single her out?

    • Valerie Plame slams Judith Miller’s ‘pathetic and self-serving’ mea culpa: Don’t flatter yourself

      Valerie Plame, who was outed as a CIA agent by members of the Bush administration, fired back at a journalist whose work helped push the U.S. into war with Iraq.

      Former New York Times reporter and current Fox News contributor Judith Miller published an essay last week in the Wall Street Journal claiming responsibility for her eventually discredited reporting on Iraqi’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

      Plame suggested in a Facebook post that Miller was flattering herself.

      “Dear Judy,” she posted Monday night. “No one is crediting you with starting the Iraq war. We know you were not actually on the team that took us into the biggest, most tragic U.S. foreign policy debacle ever. You were just cheering from the sidelines. Your attempt to re-write history is both pathetic and self-serving.”

    • US plans for anti-Islamic State training drawing skepticism

      The fight against the Islamic State group received a jolt of energy when the United States and Turkey sealed a pact to train and arm Syrian rebels. Two months later, the program faces delays and skepticism — as Turkish officials, Syrian rebels and even former American advisers openly question whether it can ever have any battlefield impact.

    • Armed attack Inside the Jordanian Department of Intelligence, baffles Jordanians

      In an unprecedented violent attack inside Jordan’s most secretive and feared government security agency, The General Intelligence Directorate (GID), also known as the “Mukhabarat” in Arabic, an intelligence officer attacked and stabbed a high ranking senior officer during an alleged armed robbery attempt last week using a stun baton Taser and a knife. The attacker was identified in a statement by the victim’s tribe and reported by the London-based newspaper Al Rai al Youm as Mohamad Abdullah al Odwan. Odwan had allegedly entered the office of intelligence officer, Lt. Colonel Khaled Tawfiq al Utoom and demanded a hundred thousand dinar ( $ 150.000) from a safe the victim had in his office and supposedly contained millions more. Rai al Youm reported that Odwan stabbed and clubbed Utoom with his stun baton after the latter refused to hand over the money to him. Odwan then fled the building after taking large sums of money from the safe, but later was arrested and currently is under investigation.

    • US Wages ”War on Terror” in the Philippines

      The War on Terror provided the US an opportunity to expand its military footprint in the Philippines.

    • Untangling the Mysteries Behind Bowe Bergdahl’s Rescue Mission

      The Haqqanis were a terrorist threat that was well known in Washington and Kabul, and they were a constant source of diplomatic headaches. During the Cold War, Jalaluddin Haqqani was a handsomely paid CIA proxy in the fight against the Soviets, but after 9/11, his family took up arms against the latest infidel invaders. “In Pakistan’s tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, Maulavi [Jalaluddin] Haqqani and his sons run a network of madrasas and training bases and provide protection for foreign fighters and terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda,” The New York Times reported in June 2008.

    • U.S. Soldier Uses Heart Breaking Wikileaks Video To Make His Point

      Below is a very disturbing and well-known Wikileaks video exposing what happened (and is still happening) in the Middle East on a daily basis. It’s called “Collateral Murder,” and the solider you see in the video is Ethan McCord; he is one of many soldiers heard in the Wikileaks video who were deployed in Iraq.

      There is some disturbing footage in it, but it’s a powerful tool to let people know about something that is commonly covered up, leaving the Western world oblivious to the reality of the situation.

      We are made to believe that soldiers are sent over to these countries to fight terror, completely ignoring the fact that innocent people, for no reason, are being killed every day.

    • PATRIOT Act Reauthorization: The Fear Mongering and Disinformation Campaign Begins

      Absent from the Leader’s memo was the fact that PATRIOT Act Sec. 215 data has never stopped a single terrorist threat to the United States, as Obama administration officials were forced to admit in the fall of 2013. Also missing from McCarthy’s memo was that fact that the “shoe bomber”, the “underwear bomber”, the Ft. Hood shooter, and the Boston Marathon bombers were not stopped by NSA’s global surveillance dragnet, as typified by Sec. 215. McCarthy’s troops were also spared the reminder that Obama’s review group on intelligence and communications technologies found the program useless. Given those omissions, it’s also not shocking that Mr. McCarthy didn’t want his members focused on DEA’s own decades-long metadata program, which only raises very uncomfortable questions about how many mass surveillance programs are running that we don’t know about.

    • Iranians Are Much Talked About on Sunday Morning TV, But Never Heard From

      Sunday morning news television is where Washington sets its media agenda for the week and, more importantly, defines its narrow range of conventional, acceptable viewpoints. It’s where the Serious People go to spout their orthodoxies and, through the illusion of “tough questioning,” disseminate DC-approved bipartisan narratives. Other than the New York Times front page, Sunday morning TV was the favorite tool of choice for Bush officials and neocon media stars to propagandize the public about Iraq; Dick Cheney’s media aide, Catherine Martin, noted in a memo that the Tim-Russert-hosted Meet the Press lets Cheney “control message,” and she testified at the Lewis Libby trial that, as a result, “I suggested we put the vice president on Meet the Press, which was a tactic we often used. It’s our best format.”

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Stingray spying: FBI’s secret deal with police hides phone dragnet from courts

      The FBI is taking extraordinary and potentially unconstitutional measures to keep local and state police forces from exposing the use of so-called “Stingray” surveillance technology across the United States, according to documents obtained separately by the Guardian and the American Civil Liberties Union.

      Multiple non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) revealed in Florida, New York and Maryland this week show federal authorities effectively binding local law enforcement from disclosing any information – even to judges – about the cellphone dragnet technology, its collection capabilities or its existence.

      In an arrangement that shocked privacy advocates and local defense attorneys, the secret pact also mandates that police notify the FBI to push for the dismissal of cases if technical specifications of the devices are in danger of being revealed in court.

    • Vilifying WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning by Hearsay

      Even a cursory glance at what Dan Ellsberg has been up to recently will show that he obviously considers them all to have made huge, historic and overwhelmingly beneficial contributions to the world. So maybe Penn should listen to what his ‘very informed’ whistleblower (who was, himself, vilified in his own day, of course) has to say on the subject.

    • Probable Cause with Sibel Edmonds: Truth vs. Silent Witnesses & Official Lies

      We are going to discuss official lies, whistleblowers, silent witnesses, and how the majority falls for official fictions and dismisses truth. We will also be discussing another common tactic used by the deep state and its tentacles to promote official-lies and cover up truth: Muddying the facts by bombarding people with conflicting, contradicting, and confusing supplementary lies before moving on to their next officially-narrated official lie.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Triassic Mass Extinction May Give Clues on How Oceans Will Be Affected by Climate Change

      Just over 200 million years ago, the end-Triassic mass extinction killed off more than half of the species of organisms living on Earth’s land and in the oceans. We are only just beginning to understand how this – and the period of runaway global warming that followed – changed the chemistry of open oceans.

      The end-Triassic mass extinction marked the transition between the Triassic to the Jurassic Period and the rise of the large herbivorous dinosaurs, such as the Diplodocus. The extinction meant that previously abundant species were cleared from ecological niches which allowed dinosaurs to move in with little competition from other animals. The Jurassic lasted another 55 million years until the beginning of the Cretaceous Period.

  • Finance

    • 10 U.S. senators seek investigation into H-1B-driven layoffs

      Ten U.S. senators, representing the political spectrum, are seeking a federal investigation into displacement of IT workers by H-1B-using contractors.

      They are asking the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department to investigate the use of the H-1B program “to replace large numbers of American workers” at Southern California Edison (SCE) and other employers.

      This letter is a significant development in this contentious issue. It arrives at the same time that lawmakers are pushing a substantial increase in H-1B visas under the I-Squared bill, legislation that would raise the H-1B cap. Two of the co-sponsors of the I-Squared bill also signed the letter asking for an investigation into H-1B program practices.

    • The 1 percent are parasites: Debunking the lies about free enterprise, trickle-down, capitalism and celebrity entrepreneurs

      ‘When did you last get a job from a poor person?’ So goes my favorite Tea Party slogan. The Americans are good at slogans but the Tea Party specializes in discombobulatingly daft ones. Of course you won’t get a job from a poor person, we wearily concede, but it doesn’t follow that the rich create jobs, as if they have special powers that turn their gains into a gift of jobs to the rest of us. U.S. billionaire Nick Hanauer is refreshingly honest about this: ‘If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.’ So why hasn’t the spectacular shift in income and financial wealth to the rich over the last four decades led to unprecedented jobs growth?

    • Scapegoat Economics 2015

      As economic crises, declines and dislocations increasingly hurt or threaten people around the globe, they provoke questions. How are we to understand the forces that produced the 2008 crisis, the crisis itself, with its quick bailouts and stimulus programs, and now the debts, austerity policies and deepening economic inequalities that do not go away? Economies this troubled force people to think and react. Some resign themselves to “hard times” as if they were natural events. Some pursue individual strategies trying to escape the troubles. Some mobilize to fight whoever they blame for it all. Many are drawn to scapegoating, usually encouraged by politicians and parties seeking electoral advantages.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Facebook: We track non-users, but it’s not intentional

      SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has admitted that it tracked non-users, but said that this happened only because of a bug.

      Facebook’s remarks come in response to a recent report from Belgium’s data protection authority accusing the firm of multiple violations of EU privacy law.

      These violations include “stalking” people geographically via Facebook mobile apps, and failing to inform users of data collection practices.

    • Facebook claims ‘a bug’ made it track nonusers

      Facebook researchers have found “a bug” that caused it to track people, even if they had never visited its website, the social media giant acknowledged this week.

      The bug caused the company to place cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” people’s browsers, even if they had never visited Facebook.com to sign up for an account, the social media website’s European Public Policy Vice President Richard Allan wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

    • Private Emails Reveal Ex-Clinton Aide’s Secret Spy Network

      Starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer, according to hacked emails from Blumenthal’s account.

    • PCLOB’s New Work: Examining “Activities” Taking Place in the Loopholes of EO 12333

      On Wednesday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board met to approve its next project. They are just about completing a general overview of the Intelligence Community’s use of EO 12333 (as part of which they’ve been nagging agencies, notably DEA and Treasury, to comply with requirements imposed by Ronald Reagan). Next, they will move onto a deep dive of two programs conducted under EO 12333, one each for NSA and CIA. PCLOB has now posted materials from Wednesday’s meeting, though this overview is also useful.

      [...]

      Finally, remember that CIA has conducted investigations targeting Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, which suggests it interprets its ability to conduct counterintelligence investigations unbelievably broadly.

    • The DEA’s Bulk Collection Program

      Defenders of the NSA’s notorious bulk telephony program have stressed since it was first disclosed that the massive database of calling information can only be used for national security investigations of foreign terror groups, and is tightly regulated by the FISA Court. This week, however, USA Today confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own bulk telephony program, first reported in January, began nearly a decade before the attacks of September 11, 2001—vacuuming up records of Americans’ calls to a whopping 116 foreign countries “linked to drug trafficking” using administrative subpoenas. This is presumably the “massive database of phone records” referenced in a 2013 Reuters story on the shady practice of “parallel construction,” wherein state or local law enforcement agency are fed tips from DEA, then encouraged to “phony up investigations” (in the words of one Harvard law professor) in order to conceal the true origins of the information from courts and criminal investigations.

    • The government hides surveillance programs just because people would freak out

      The justification they were using for the NSA’s program – that it was only being used against dangerous terrorists, not ordinary criminals – just wasn’t true with the DEA. The public would clearly be outraged by the twisted legal justification that radically re-interpreted US law in complete secrecy. “They couldn’t defend both programs”, a former Justice Department official told Heath. The piece also reveals that Attorney General Eric Holder “didn’t think we should have that information” in the first place, which is interesting because Holder was one of the first Justice Department officials to approve the program during the Clinton administration. It’s nice he came to his senses, but if the program never risked going public, would he have felt the same?

      There are many other surveillance programs the government is desperate to keep hidden. Consider Stingray devices, the mini fake cell phone towers that can vacuum up cell phone data of entire neighborhoods at the same time and which are increasingly being used by local cops all around the country. The Associated Press reported this week that the Baltimore police have used these controversial devices thousands of times in the course of ordinary investigations and have tried to hide how the devices are used from judges.

      The lengths to which the FBI will go to keep these devices secret from the public is alarming. As a Guardian investigation detailed on Friday, the FBI makes local police that use them sign non-disclosure agreements, and goes as far as to direct them to dismiss charges against potential criminals if the phone surveillance will be exposed at trial (as is required by due process rights in the Fifth Amendment).

    • A reminder of journalism’s power to do the right thing

      Like others before him — such as Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers — Snowden released his findings to the press, and trusted journalists to do their job in exposing government malfeasance and lack of accountability. Also like Ellsberg, Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917.

    • Sun Investigates: Cellphone surveillance seen years earlier in ‘The Wire’

      The Baltimore Police Department surprised many when it revealed recently that it has used a cellphone surveillance device known as a “stingray” 4,300 times since 2007.

    • NSA thinks it can keep spying without compromising your security

      American police and spies love the idea of back door access to encrypted data that lets them snoop on suspicious types, but many will tell you that they’re wildly optimistic. Even if you don’t mind the implication that the government has a right to spy on anyone, this could easily introduce a flaw that any attacker can use. National Security Agency chief Michael Rogers thinks there’s a happy medium, however. At a recent speech, he called for a “front door” encryption key that would provide access, but would be broken into pieces that prevents any one agency or person from getting in. This theoretically prevents thieves (and less than scrupulous authorities) from grabbing your data, but still lets officials look around when they have permission.

    • The NSA wants tech companies to give it ‘front door’ access to encrypted data

      The National Security Agency is embroiled in a battle with tech companies over access to encrypted data that would allow it to spy (more easily) on millions of Americans and international citizens. Last month, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple urged the Obama administration to put an end to the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata. The NSA, on the other hand, continues to parade the idea that the government needs access to encrypted data on smartphones and other devices to track and prevent criminal activity. Now, NSA director Michael S. Rogers says he might have a solution.

    • NSA and the Stasi – a cautionary tale on mass surveillance

      Four decades of domination over almost all aspects of life in East Germany came to an abrupt halt 25 years ago on 31 March 1990. One of the most intrusive surveillance organisations in human history, the Ministry for State Security, more infamously known as the Stasi, was dissolved. This is a poignant milestone as a global debate about privacy rages in the wake of revelations of massive US surveillance of internet communications.

  • Civil Rights

    • Virginia Beach Police investigating forceful viral video arrest

      Virginia Beach Police say they are investigating a “Use of Force” incident that occurred during an arrest that was recorded on a cell phone back in January.

      [...]

      Cervera would not say what part of the video he’s uncomfortable with, but did say he is questioning whether an officer stopped the recording and later deleted it.

    • We Do This for Rekia

      Upset about the amount of noise he claimed a group of young people were making in a nearby park, Servin recklessly fired over his shoulder at a crowd while sitting in his car. Rekia Boyd died less than 24 hours after being struck in the head by one of the five rounds Servin fired.

    • A Game of Substitution

      The same people, of course, told you I was lying when I blew the whistle on torture and extraordinary rendition in 2004. The security services and the British Government would never do such a thing, they said. I was insane, they said.

    • The Price of a Life

      What’s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom?

    • CIA torture flights in Scotland: Detectives claim there is ‘no proof’ terror prisoners were on board when they landed here

      A TWO-YEAR police probe into the so-called rendition flights has failed to unearth evidence that terror suspects were travelling on planes which used Scots airports.

    • Remote Polish Airport With Dark CIA History Gets €30 Mln in EU Funds

      A small remote airport in north-eastern Poland, once used by the CIA as a rendition hub, has already received over €30 million in EU funds for its re-fit, but experts say it is a perfect example of “how-not-to and where-not-to” invest, as its economic feasibility, projected tourist forecasts, and impact on local employment are desperately low.

    • Diego Garcia: UK stalls release of CIA black site ‘torture flight’ records

      The UK government continues to delay the publication of flight records which could prove the British overseas territory of Diego Garcia was used by the CIA for “torture flights,” a human rights NGO has said.

      Reprieve, which advocates for prisoners’ human rights in Guantanamo and elsewhere, said the UK government admitted in 2008 that Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian Ocean, was used by two CIA rendition jets carrying prisoners in 2002.

      With the release of the Senate torture report in December, it was revealed that the CIA flew captives to secret prisons, known as black sites, across the globe as part of its rendition program.

    • Diego Garcia: UK Delays Publication of Flight Records Which May Hold Truth About CIA Activities

      The UK Foreign Office (FCO) has further delayed publication of flight records for Diego Garcia, following disclosures by a senior Bush administration official that interrogations took place at a CIA black site on the British island.

      FCO officials are “still assessing the suitability of the full flight records for publication”, nine months after they were first requested from the government by human rights NGO Reprieve.

    • UK stalls publication of CIA rendition flights records

      The UK Government is continuing to delay the publication of flight records which could hold evidence of the use of British territory by CIA ‘torture flights’ – over eight months after it said it was “assessing their suitability for publication.”

      The Government has previously admitted that Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian Ocean, was used by two CIA ‘rendition’ jets carrying prisoners in 2002. The rendition programme saw prisoners flown around the world in order to be subjected to torture at secret prisons known as ‘black sites’, says the legal charity Reprieve.

      However, since making the admission in 2008, successive British administrations have failed to publish flight records which could shed further light on the role played in the rendition programme by the island.

    • Obama May Add More Layers of Bureaucracy in CIA Reorganization

      In announcing the reorganization in early March, Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan boasted that after the sweeping reorganization is implemented, the agency will be in the position to cover “the entire universe, regionally and functionally, and so something that’s going on in the world falls into one of those buckets.”

    • John Brennan’s deserving CIA reorganization plan

      We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.

    • John Brennan’s makeover of the CIA
    • Re-Opening The Investigation: CIA Black Sites

      They certainly sought to please in those initial dark days when a position at the NATO table was at stake. This was something of a new world order – the attacks after September 11, 2001 did certainly allow Washington to make that spurious case. The stakes were high, and the “need” for pressing intelligence saw a crude clipping of various liberties and protections.

    • ‘We Got the Wrong Guy’: Ex Spy Reveals CIA Syria Torture Error

      According to new accounts from former agent John Kiriakou, several spies warned against the rendition to Syria of Mahrer Arar, where he was tortured.

      A former spy was convinced that the U.S. intelligence agency CIA’s rendition and torture of the Canadian Mahrer Arar amounted to punishment of the wrong man.

      According to new accounts from former agent John Kiriakou, several colleagues warned against the treatment of Arar, which led to a public inquiry in Canada and a US$10 million federal government pay-out.

    • CIA staff tried to stop arrest, torture of Maher Arar, says former spy
    • Former spy: CIA employees tried to stop arrest, torture of Canadian Arar
    • Maher Arar’s arrest, torture almost stopped by CIA, ex-spy says

      A former spy has described the debate within the CIA over the arrest, rendition and torture of Canadian Maher Arar, saying multiple colleagues warned against it because they were convinced they were punishing an innocent man.

      The account from former CIA officer John Kiriakou sheds new light on decade-old events that caused a public inquiry in Canada, a $10 million payout from the federal government, and unsuccessful lawsuits in the U.S.

      It’s a rare peek into discussions within the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — whose role in the 2002-03 events has never been publicly examined, having remained off-limits in Canada’s inquiry.

    • John Kiriakou, CIA Ex-Spy, On Canada’s Intelligence Safeguards: ‘You’re Kidding Me’

      A former CIA spy’s eyes widen when he hears that, in Canada, the political opposition doesn’t get to see or scrutinize national-security intelligence files.

      “You’re kidding me,” says John Kiriakou, who’s now under house arrest in Virginia after a two-year prison stay for revealing information about his former employer.

    • CIA Officials Knew Rendition Victim Was ‘The Wrong Guy,’ Kiriakou Reveals

      CIA insiders objected to the arrest, rendition, and torture of Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar, but high-ranking officials ignored concerns that they were punishing an innocent man, according to former spy and whistleblower John Kiriakou in an interview with the Canadian Press.

    • Editorial: U.S. owes Arar an apology

      The United States will never apologize for sending former Ottawa resident Maher Arar off to be tortured in a Syrian prison, nor will the country tell us what led to that awful decision. For all we know, Arar remains on our neighbour’s anti-terror watch list, despite having his name cleared by a public inquiry here and earning a $10 million settlement (and an apology) from the Canadian government for its own shameful role in his extraordinary rendition.

    • Kiriakou: CIA Officials Knew Torture Victim Maher Arar Was Innocent

      CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou has revealed new details about the CIA’s internal debate over the arrest, rendition and torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar. Kirakou told The Canadian Press news agency numerous colleagues warned against arresting Arar, saying he was innocent. But Kiriakou said an unnamed female officer insisted on pressing ahead, saying Arar had links to al-Qaeda.

    • CIA employees tried to stop arrest, torture of Arar, former spy says

      A former spy has described the debate within the CIA over the arrest, rendition and torture of Maher Arar, saying multiple colleagues warned against it because they were convinced they were punishing an innocent man.

    • Ex CIA member says some agency workers questioned Maher Arar arrest
    • CIA Knew They Tortured the Wrong Man, Whistleblower Kiriakou Says

      John Kiriakou has alleged that CIA insiders protested the arrest and torture of Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar knowing that he was innocent, but a woman in CIA middle-management, whose identity he will not reveal, insisted upon the man’s arrest.

    • A former CIA agent who led counterterrorism arrests in Pakistan shares tales after two years in jail
    • A torture-denouncing CIA agent speaks after two years in jail
    • A CIA agent’s tales from the federal slammer

      He was jailed for telling journalists a bit too much about his former employer: the CIA. He insists he was punished for blowing the whistle on the use of torture in 2007, not because he tipped off journalists to the identity of a couple of former spy colleagues, which is why he was charged.

      “I’m 100 per cent positive,” Kiriakou says in an interview at home, where he’s completing his sentence under house arrest after two years in jail.

      He’s adamant that he’s being singled out. Lots of names leak out of the agency without consequences, he says. Also, he accuses the FBI of trying to entrap him several times and failing.

      To avoid a return trip to prison, there are limits to what he’ll say in interviews.

      He will describe how former CIA colleagues protested the arrest, transfer, and torture in Syria of Canadian Maher Arar — but he absolutely won’t reveal the name of a woman in CIA middle-management who he says insisted on Arar’s arrest.

    • UK ‘Assessing’ Diego Garcia Flight Records Amid CIA Torture Claims

      The British government has been accused of stalling over the publication of flight records in and out of the British-owned island of Diego Garcia, amid claims the remote Indian Ocean location was used as part of the CIA’s post 9/11 torture and rendition program.

    • Sri Lanka – Another pawn in the CIA/MI6 Gameplan

      During the election campaign the scene was set to overthrow Rajapaksa by ballot or by force.

    • Senior ex-general hints at CIA involvement in Balyoz coup plot case

      Retired Gen. Bilgin Balanlı, who was among the 236 suspects acquitted in the “Balyoz” (Sledgehammer) coup-plot case, has said the United States or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could have had a finger in the coup case.

      The CIA or the U.S.’ “deep state” could have been involved in the case, recalling the testimony of a suspect, who said in 2010 he and a former deputy had picked up a sack full of documents in 2007 to be used in the Balyoz coup plot case from an American senator and a retired Turkish major in Istanbul and taken it to Ankara, according to Balanlı.

    • Television box sets: fact vs fiction

      As female CIA operatives complain about how women spies are portrayed in Homeland, and Ed Miliband says The Thick Of It was “too close to reality”, we take a look at some of the best-loved TV shows – how good were they at capturing real life?

    • Female CIA Agents Speak Out About Their Job, Slam Hollywood Portrayals Of Agency

      Women in the CIA say that depictions of female agents are not accurate and that some of the portrayals are downright offensive. The women in the CIA sisterhood say that Hollywood shows female agents as seductresses who rely on their good looks and charm. However, many CIA agents say that simply isn’t true and that female CIA agents are far from centerfolds.

      The New York Times, at the request of the notoriously tight-lipped CIA organization, spoke with current and former female agents to get a better understanding of exactly what the women agents in the field do. In the movies and on television, female agents are highly sexualized and can be seen sleeping with terrorists, seducing assets, and becoming overly emotional while in the field.

    • Female CIA Agents Fed Up with ‘Hollywood Sensationalism’ of Their Characters
    • ‘We don’t look that way and we don’t act that way’: The real women of the CIA slam ‘crazed and emotional’ portrayals of female agents in TV and movies
    • CIA Reaches Out to LGBT Community
    • Human Rights Watch urging Obama to prosecute Bush-era torture

      An international human rights group has launched a campaign calling on President Barack Obama to ensure that future presidents will not “view torture as a viable policy option.”

      Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, has drawn up a petition urging the Obama administration to begin a “full criminal investigation” into torture techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) post 9/11 attacks.

    • Obama Faces Latin American Opposition to Venezuela Sanctions as Cuba Joins Summit of the Americas

      President Obama has arrived in Panama to attend the Summit of the Americas along with other leaders from Canada, Central America, South America, the Caribbean — and for the first time, Cuba. On Thursday, Obama announced the State Department has finished its review of whether Cuba should be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The move would allow the two countries to reopen their embassies and move forward on historic efforts to normalize relations that were announced in December. Meanwhile, the United States faces other tensions at the summit over its recent sanctions against Cuba’s close ally, Venezuela. An executive order signed by President Obama last month used the designation to sanction top Venezuelan officials over alleged human rights abuses and corruption. This week, the United States announced it no longer considers the country a national security threat. Other topics expected to be on the summit’s agenda include trade, security and migration. We speak with two guests: Miguel Tinker Salas, professor of Latin American history at Pomona College and author of the new book, “Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know,” and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and president of Just Foreign Policy. His article in The Hill is headlined “Obama Could Face Disastrous Summit Due to Venezuela Sanctions.”

    • Venezuela Withdraws from OAS Civil Society Forum in Solidarity with Cuba

      Caracas has joined Havana in withdrawing its delegation to the Civil Society Forum at the 7th Summit of the Americas this week, after Cuban delegates broke the news that at least 20 counter-revolutionary Cuban “mercenaries” had also been invited to participate in the event.

      Among the highly controversial figures set to participate in the forum are the radical anti-Cuban government dissidents, Manuel Cuesta Morúa, Elizardo Sánchez and Rosa María Payá, as well as members of the Cuban exile community. All are known to have financial ties to U.S. funding agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and have a history of trying to subvert the Cuban government. Ex-CIA agent, Félix Rodríguez Mendigutía, better known for his role in the assassination of Argentinian revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, is also participating in the summit.

    • Che Guevara Murderer Attending Summit of the Americas

      According to some reports, Felix Rodriguez has arrived in Panama to attend the OAS forums.

      According to Yoanislandia, quoting “friends in solidarity with Cuba,” the man who murdered Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Felix Rodriguez, arrived in Panama on Tuesday to attend the Summit of the Americas forums.

    • Che´s Daughter Rejects Presence in Panama of Man that Murdered her Father

      Aleida Guevara, daughter of Cuban-Argentinean revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, described as shameful the presence in the activities of the Summit of the Americas of Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia, who was directly involved in the assassination of her father, in Bolivia.

      “In was a nonsense decision by whoever admitted him, said Guevara and reiterated that the presence of the former CIA agent is shameful. Felix was a CIA instrument and he offered himself in a mean manner to murder him.”

    • Obama optimistic for Cuba relations, Castro recalls past confrontations with U.S.

      Leaders of the United States and Cuba did something Saturday they hadn’t done since the spring of 1959, all the way back to the Eisenhower administration: Meet diplomatically face-to-face.

      President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro — the brother of longtime ruler Fidel Castro — met at the Summit of the Americas in Panama Saturday, and the visit is the talk of the conference.

    • Boston Marathon Bombings’ Guilty Verdict Exposed as a Gross Travesty of Justice

      The FBI and CIA’s common misuse of paying informants to entrap others globally into joining plots of terrorism was well documented in researcher-author Trevor Aaronson’s book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. Between 9/11 and 2011 he confirmed that 508 defendants were recruited by informants paid up to $100,000 in multiple sting operations. In fact, in all but only three high profile cases were the FBI and their informants not involved. Again, this demonstrates that the US government’s calling card around the world reads “Terrorism-R-US,” just another M.O. for squandering hard earned taxpayer dollars to keep its invented “war on terror” very much ongoing and alive forever.

    • Finnish investor banned from Russia after FSB warning

      Russian authorities have denied entry to prominent businessman Seppo Remes and accused him of espionage, the Finnish investor claims. Remes is a board member in several Russian energy companies.

    • Finnish businessman says denied entry into Russia after FSB warning

      Finnish businessman Seppo Remes, co-owner of a Swedish company which invests in Russian electricity assets, said he had been denied entry into Russia for five years after receiving a warning from the Federal Security Service.

    • FSB Detains Opposition Journalist in Latest Crackdown on Crimean Press

      Russia’s Federal Security Service has detained an opposition-minded journalist in Crimea, a colleague said, in the latest in a series of Moscow’s investigations against Crimean reporters and writers who have criticized Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula.

    • Crimean journalist reported abducted by Russia’s FSB

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Anti-Piracy Threats Trigger Massive Surge in VPN Usage

        Piracy is a hot topic around the world and in Australia the issue has made mainstream headlines over the past week. After the announcement of a new anti-piracy scheme and the news of copyright trolls coming Down Under this week, VPN usage has surged to unprecedented levels.

04.11.15

Links 11/4/2015: elementary OS Freya, Mageia 5 on the Way

Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Coreboot Ported To A ~$30 AMD AM1 Motherboard

    For those searching for a low-cost system/motherboard for experimenting with Coreboot, there’s another new AMD motherboard that now works with Coreboot’s upstream Git code. The board costs only about $30 USD and works with all modern AMD AM1 processors.

  • New Google Boards Added To Coreboot

    The newest additions to Coreboot are the Veyron_Mighty and Veyron_Jerry. The Veyron series has been part of the Chromium OS repository since last year. These codenames are for devices powered by a Rockchip ARM SoC.

  • 5 Things To Know About The Rise Of Open Source

    The definition of open source can get complicated (especially when you start talking about licensing). Essentially open source software makes the source code freely available for use and/or modification, free of charge.

    This could give the impression that open source is for hobbyists and amateurs, but you will probably recognize the names of some major open source users: The Emmys, The Grammy Foundation, NBC, CBS and Sony, all use ​Metal Toad Media to develop their websites with open source tools.

  • New Open-source Encryption Software is Practically Uncrackable

    With the rise of mass surveillance efforts being carried out by intelligence agencies, researchers and industry professionals are currently working together to look for solutions that will enable them to protect sensitive information from being breached.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla disables new Firefox features to address critical security flaw

        On March 31, Mozilla released the latest version of Firefox, 37.0 — but the foundation has already issued a significant patch for that update, after discovering a critical security bug that broke HTTPS encryption in a way that was invisible to the end user. Ironically, one of the original points of the Firefox 37 update was to add security through the use of a feature known as opportunistic encryption.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • The Document Liberation, one year after

      The Document Liberation is a project of The Document Foundation, announced in early April 2014 to host the different libraries handling proprietary and legacy document formats within LibreOffice. The idea was to provide a single repository for other software projects willing to deploy the same libraries, in order to simplify the integration. The project is led by Fridrich Strba and David Tardon, two long time LibreOffice contributors.

    • Happy birthday, Document Liberation Project!

      The Document Liberation Project was officially announced at LGM in Leipzig on April 2 2014, a year ago. We (the founding members) gave a talk about the project later on the same day.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Obama and Castro shake hands, begin new chapter in US-Cuba relations

    With a cordial evening handshake, President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro moved Friday toward a groundbreaking meeting on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas in what would be a remarkable display of reconciliation between two nations.

    The powerful symbolism of a substantial exchange Saturday between the leaders with the leadership of the Western Hemisphere gathered around them could signal progress. Both sides are still working through nettlesome issues that would lead to the opening of embassies in Washington and Havana, the first stage in a new diplomatic relationship.

  • The growing childishness of American adults: Mallick

    A new daycare for adults in Brooklyn, N.Y. is just the latest symbol of the infantilism of American grown-ups.

  • Science

    • Smartphone data to give early warning of earthquakes

      One day last August, in the early hours of the morning, a 6.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Napa Valley, waking people all around California’s famed wine region. Many were wearing fitness trackers. Once the quake was over, tracker company Jawbone gathered the data in a public graphic, using it to detail the differences in disturbance for lifeloggers in Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Deterring Cyberattacks With Sanctions?

      But deterrence is useless if you can’t figure out who attacked you. Malware isn’t like an ICBM that leaves a clear trail going from point-A to point-B. Thanks to Ed Snowden it’s public knowledge Five-Eyes Intelligence agencies have invested heavily in developing anonymity technology and conducting deception operations that aim to conceal the origins of their clandestine attacks. It would be naïve to believe that other countries aren’t doing the same.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Fight Imperialism with Unity, Says Morales

      U.S. imperialism is being challenged by regional organizations like CELAC, according to Bolivia’s president.

    • Hecklers Try To Veto University Screening Of ‘American Sniper;’ May Find Themselves Watching ‘Paddington Bear’ Instead

      “Harmed” how? By offering a movie no one on campus was obligated to watch? It wasn’t a mandatory event and those offended by the movie had several options available, most of which didn’t involve ensuring no one on campus could see the movie.

      In what would appear to be a dig at the “victims” infantilization-by-proxy of the entire student body, but is more likely due to a limited selection of last-minute offerings (guaranteed not to result in a swift petitioning), the CCI decided to screen “Paddington Bear” instead. For a student body composed of 18-23 year olds.

    • Graphic New Veteran-Sponsored Ads Are Asking Drone Pilots Not to Fly

      A group of anti-drone US military veterans want to put an end to American’s campaign of drone strikes in foreign countries, and they’re now taking the fight to prime time by directly calling on Air Force pilots to stop the destruction through a series of graphic television spots.

    • Commercials urge drone pilots to refuse to fly missions

      Anti-drone groups are airing cable television commercials near Beale Air Force Base, California, urging remotely piloted aircraft pilots to refuse to carry out missions.

      “The reason that we felt we had to start running these ads is the president and the Congress have been irresponsible and – we believe – operating illegally and immorally to let these drone attacks continue,” said Nick Mottern, of the group KnowDrones, the lead group behind the effort. “We felt that we had to speak directly to the people who were being ordered to do the killing because, at this point, it seems they’re the only ones who can put a stop to this.”

    • Campaign against killer drones launched in USA

      The goal of the campaign is to appeal to those who receive orders to kill. Those people should listen to the call of their conscience before they launch another drone, campaign organizers believe.

    • These Human Rights Activists Want To Ban ‘Killer Robots’

      If a human soldier commits a war crime, he has to face the consequences (at least in theory). The same goes for human operators of drones (again, in theory). But if a fully autonomous war machine with no human operator goes rogue and kills a whole bunch of innocent people, who would be responsible? Its programmers? The manufacturers? Finding someone to blame would be hard enough, and proving it in a court of law would be nearly impossible.

    • US-backed airstrikes on Yemen kill civilians – and hopes for peace

      You can’t bomb a country into existence, however much America seems determined to try.

      In the last week, 164 Yemeni civilians have lost their lives in the Saudi bombardment of my country. In media reports – full of geopolitical talk of “proxy wars” and “regional interests” – the names of the dead are absent. As always, it is ordinary Yemeni families who are left grieving, and forgotten.

    • The Yemen choice

      The Middle East imbroglio demonstrates the complexity of the post-9/11 world in which Obama’s foreign policy has managed to upset America’s traditional Arab allies while strengthening the position of its adversary, Iran.

      President Obama’s preferred approach to US foreign policy largely flows from the strategies of retrenchment, ie reducing but not completely avoiding American military and financial commitments abroad, and offshore balancing, that is: using regional allies to check the rise of potential hostile powers.

      Retrenchment has so far backfired in Iraq and a positive outcome in Afghanistan is yet to emerge. Offshore balancing is useful in regions where great powers have minimal engagements. In places like the Middle East the strategy is bound to spawn contradictions and Obama’s foreign policy therefore rests on inherent– and deliberate– ambiguity.

    • Manhunters Inc.: How the Predator Became Washington’s Calling Card
    • Hunting Humans by Remote Control

      Drones seemed to come out of nowhere, sexy as the latest iPhones and armed to kill. They were all-seeing eyes in the sky (“a constant stare,” as drone promoters liked to say) and surgically precise in their ability to deliver death to evildoers. Above all, without pilots in their cockpits, they were, in terms of the human price of war (at least when it came to the lives that mattered to us), cost free. They transformed battle into a video-game experience, leaving the “warriors” – from pilots to generals – staring at screens. What could possibly go wrong?

    • How Drones Turned American Wars Into Manhunts and Humans Into Prey

      In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, George W. Bush had predicted that the United States would embark upon a new kind of warfare, “a war that requires us to be on an international manhunt.” Something that initially sounded like nothing more than a catchy Texas cowboy slogan has since been converted into state doctrine, complete with experts, plans, and weapons. A single decade has seen the establishment of an unconventional form of state violence that combines the disparate characteristics of warfare and policing without really corresponding to either, finding conceptual and practical unity in the notion of a militarized manhunt.

    • Yemen: We did it again.

      The US has unleashed a great deal of blood upon the world, with its willingness to use “bombs” as our first reaction to any situation. We killed over one million in Iraq, and we have lost the ability to solve problems diplomatically; rather, we resort to the only tool in our tool bag, bombs. Such a policy has caused incredible death and destruction in Iraq, but also in Libya, Syria, and now Yemen, and much of current Yemeni blood is on our hands.

    • Somalia issues bounties for top Shebab leaders

      Somalia’s government has issued bounties for 11 top leaders of the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab militants, with $250,000 offered for the extremist’s chief, Ahmad Umar.

    • Obama’s excessive drone strikes in Somalia intensifies hate against Christians and the U.S.

      President Obama and White House officials are defending the United States’ “low-investment, light-footprint approach to counterterrorism.” As war and death plague places like Somalia and Yemen every day, President Obama continues to issue airstrikes with drones.

    • Why Al-Shabaab Kills

      The whole world knows of the horrors inflicted on Kenyan civilians by Somalia’s Al-Shabaab. But, the “corporate media tells Americans little if anything about Somalia’s road to ruin,” paved by the United States and its Ethiopian and Kenyan allies. “If there were true justice in this world the United States and its puppets would not only have to leave that country but make restitution as well.”

    • Controversy Swirls Around NYU Law Professor Involved in Obama’s Drone Program

      Harold Koh, the former legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State, is getting a chilly reception from some law students and alumni of New York University Law School, where he is currently a visiting scholar.

    • ‘Schizophrenia’ Of US Drone Programme Gets Cinema Treatment

      ”We’ve never asked a soldier to go and fight the Taliban for 12 hours and then go and pick up the kids from school,” he says.

    • Pakistani judge wants CIA official tried for murder
    • Pakistan judge orders charges against ex–CIA officials over drone deaths
    • Pakistan judge orders charges against ex–CIA officials over drone deaths
    • Ex-CIA Officials Face Police Inquiry Over Pakistan Drone Deaths

      A court in Pakistan has ordered police to investigate two former CIA officials over the deaths of two people in a drone strike.

    • Pakistani Court Orders Charges Against CIA Officials for 2009 Drone Strike

      A high court in Pakistan has ordered criminal charges against two CIA officials for a deadly drone strike in 2009. John Rizzo, the CIA’s former acting counsel, and Jonathan Bank, the agency’s ex-station chief, would face charges including murder, terrorism and conspiracy.

    • IHC orders registration of FIR against former CIA station chief
    • Pakistan Issues Murder Warrant for CIA Station Chief and Lawyer who Oversaw Drone Program
    • Do You Have to be a Muslim to be a Terrorist?

      Would a Muslim receive tougher terrorism sentencing than anybody else?

      The question might seem outlandish but the differing court verdicts of terrorism cases, between a Muslim and those of other beliefs, emphasize the inconsistencies in legal judgements.

      This kind of double standard has angered the British Muslim community. It’s now holding credible weight. The Lufthansa’s Germanwings airliner tragedy being a case in point. The investigation’s prosecutor, Brice Robin, dismissed the notion of terrorism, quoting: ‘There is no indication of any kind of terrorist background’. In other words, when a person’s background ticks all the boxes is it terrorism.

      This logic is deeply flawed. The co-pilot Andreas Lubitz’s suicide mission that killed him and the rest of the 150 passengers shared the same intent as the 9/11 killings, yet the media stopped short of reporting terrorism. No doubt, a Muslim name would have swung it.

    • NY Times Covers Up Washington’s Monstrous Evil

      The NY Times on Monday ran a lengthy piece (“One Woman’s Mission to Free Laos from Millions of Unexploded Bombs”) on Channapha Khamvongas, a 42-year-old Laotian-American woman on a mission to get the US to help Laos clean up the countless unexploded anti-personnel “bombis” that it dropped, which are still killing peasants — especially children — half a century after the so-called “Secret War” by the US against Laos ended.

      The article explained that Khamvongas, as a young adult in Virginia, had read a book by anti-war activist Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War (originally published in 1972 and reissued in 2013), which featured accounts and hand drawings by refugees from that war of the deadly US aerial attacks and bombings of their farms and villages. It was a book that sparked revulsion in the US over the saturation bombing of Southeast Asia’s smallest and least developed country — a nation of under six million people.

    • Congress of War

      It is very bewildering, albeit horrifyingly fascinating, to watch American politicians jockey and posture for war with Iran. With the announcement last week that years of negotiations have yielded a framework agreement that will arrest any Iranian nuclear weapons program, not that one actually exists, while starting the much needed process of bringing Iran back into the world community, many members of Congress seem not just reluctant, but hostile, to the prospects of averting a war with Iran.

    • US-Created Violence and Chaos in Yemen

      Yemen is one of many examples of what happens following lawless US intervention.

    • Russia and Red Cross appeal for “humanitarian pause” in Yemen
    • Failure of Obama doctrine

      To suggest that the US policies in Yemen were a “failure” is an understatement. It implies that the US had at least attempted to succeed. But “succeed” at what? The US drone war had no other objective aside from celebration the elimination of whomever the US hit list designates as terrorist.

    • The Life and Death of Vietnam War Veteran Jack Wheeler: A Good Man in an Evil World

      As an Army officer, Jack wrote the US Department of Defense manual urging abstinence toward all use of chemical and biological warfare banned under the 1925 post-World War I Geneva Protocol and again reinforced in 1972 and 1993. Yet that’s rarely stopped hypocritical rogue states in their arrogance of exceptionalism like the US and Israel as the world’s most notorious violators from breaking international law at will, most recently using flesh burning white phosphorus in Fallujah, Iraq and tear gas on our own citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceful assembly and free speech during the Occupy Wall Street movement and frequent public demonstrations right up to the present. Of course Israel has used poison nerve gas on Palestinians on numerous occasions with impunity. Recall that it was during the 1980’s Reagan administration that sent US made chemical weapons to then ally Saddam Hussein while he waged war against neighboring Iran, knowing Hussein would use it on his own people the Kurds as well as on Iran’s military that US intelligence provided Hussein with enemy troop movement.

    • Yemen crisis reignites fear of al-Qaeda global threat

      But the drone strikes have also killed many Yemeni civilians and they have been hugely resented by local tribes.

    • Saudi actions backfire

      Saudi Arabia bears the greatest responsibility for the triumphant advance of the Houthi militia in Yemen, says Birgit Svensson: the leading Sunni power in the Gulf simply stood by while a Shia counterbalance emerged virtually on its doorstep, thereby creating an opportunity for Tehran

    • Hiding under the cloak of ‘collateral’ damage is unacceptable

      War is ravaging Yemen and civilians, including infants, are getting killed. The situation is catastrophic.

      As we have seen before with the US-led invasion of Iraq, no matter how much the missile-shooter, bomb-droppers and drone-attackers would have you believe about perfection of their war machines, gadgets and equipment, they simply have not perfected their deadly science. They are never precise, which leads to unintended consequences, what are conveniently dumped as the ‘collateral damages’. Thus, we witnessed the cold-blooded murder of nearly a million Iraqis, old and young, and another quarter million or so in Afghanistan who had nothing to do with the WMD and 9/11.

    • Lucknow Police To Use Pepper-Spraying Drones For Crowd Control; A First for India

      Capital of Uttar Pradesh and India’s 8th most populous city: Lucknow has become the first city in India to use to drones for crowd control. Police chief of Lucknow, Yashasvi Yadav has announced that they have purchased 5 high powered drones, costing Rs 6,00,000 each, which will be used for monitoring and controlling unruly mob.

    • Police Drones against Protesters: the “Machine Imperative”

      Innovation, Edmund Burke reminds us in “A Letter to a Noble Lord,” does not necessarily imply reform. While the peaceful uses of drones are often treated as the benign effects of the security industrial complex, the spill over into more violent deployments has proven unavoidable. What is done in Waziristan against Taliban militants will eventually be done to US citizens on a smaller yet significant scale – the civilian cloaking there becomes as irrelevant in tribal foothills as it does on the streets of Chicago.

      The drone monitors have gotten excited by an announcement that Indian police forces will be making use of drones to deploy pepper spray against protesters. Trials were conducted on Tuesday in Lucknow, with the city’s police force anticipating using five such vehicles later this month. “The results,” claimed the jubilant police chief Yashasvi Yadav, “were brilliant. We have managed to work out how to use it to precisely target the mob in winds and congested areas.”[1]

      The language used by Yadav serves an important purpose. Drones are weapons of use against that dark, primordial “mob,” difficult to control, unruly of purpose. From the perspective of many state authorities, any protesting group constitutes an unruly “mob”. The idea of a peaceful protest is nowhere to be seen, the greatest of unnatural phenomena. But Yadav insists that, “Pepper is non-lethal but very effective in mob control. We can spray from different heights to have maximum results.”

    • Sunday Extra: Obama has brought little hope, almost no change to war policy

      Many Americans are unaware that President Obama is:

      — Making war in eight countries around the world — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and the Philippines — in violation of the U.N. Charter, which forbids “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state” without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.

    • No justice for drone attack victims

      A single bench comprising Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui will hear the case. The IHC had ordered for the registration of murder case in respect of two persons killed in drone attack at South Waziristan in 2010.

      The petitioner sought contempt of court proceedings against the SHO Secretariat police for not registering a murder case of two persons killed in drone attack.

    • DOJ chief: Nothing illegal with US role in Exodus

      There was nothing illegal about the participation of the US in Operation Plan Exodus in Mamasapano last Jan. 25 that resulted in the killing of international wanted terrorist Zulkifli bin Hir, alias Marwan, as well as the death of 44 police commandos, at least 17 Moro fighters and five civilians, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima said yesterday.

      De Lima said the involvement of US forces in the planning and execution of the operation did not violate the Constitution or any law.

    • Americans have yet to grasp the horrific magnitude of the ‘war on terror’

      The report estimates that at least 1.3 million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan from direct and indirect consequences of the U.S. “war on terrorism.” One million people perished in Iraq alone, a shocking 5 percent of the country’s population. The staggering civilian toll and the hostility it has engendered erodes the myth that the sprawling “war on terrorism” made the U.S. safer and upheld human rights, all at an acceptable cost.

    • Face Off: The Coming War between Armenia and Azerbaijan

      Diplomacy is barely keeping the lid on a conventional war in Ukraine; from Nigeria to the Fertile Crescent war is about as common as peace.

    • The National Interest: strategic advantage on Karabakh’s side
    • The National Interest: Strategic advantage and favorable defensible terrain in Nagorno Karabakh are under Armenian control

      The author highlights that the Azerbaijani side has significantly increased its military spending over the recent years, and this trend has not abated, despite the global decline of oil prices. Israel has been one of Azerbaijan’s strongest defense partners for several years now, and as a result of this relationship, the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan have acquired Israeli drones.

    • Iran claims to have killed ‘terrorist team’ run by foreign intel agencies

      Iran has accused Israel and its allies in the West of assassinating its nuclear scientists and attacking its nuclear sites with computer viruses.

      Israel has always declined comment on such accusations, saying that it does not comment on foreign reports.

    • U.S. Army May Investigate Colombia Child Rape Claims

      The U.S. Army may investigate accusations of sexual assault against its soldiers and contractors in Colombia, a spokesman said Friday, the military’s first response to claims published by a joint project of Colombia’s government and the guerrillas of the FARC.

      Army investigators are working with Colombia’s government to decide whether to launch a formal investigation into any of the claims that at least 54 Colombian girls and women were assaulted by U.S. troops and contractors between 2004 and 2007. A probe into a previous assault claim was inconclusive, although the alleged victim declined to cooperate with investigators, the spokesman told USA Today.

      The claims originated from a joint project of the ongoing peace talks between Colombia’s government and the leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Historical researchers said in a report that they found evidence that 53 girls were raped by U.S. contractors operating out of Colombia’s Tolemaida military base near the village of Melgar in the central state of Tolima. Their independent report was aimed at addressing the rights of more than 7 million victims of Colombia’s 50-year internal conflict.

    • Red Tory, Blue Tory

      I should however like to see clarification from the SNP. Labour and Tory can of course combine to vote Trident replacement through. If that happens with Labour in office, the SNP should make plain that would mean the withdrawal of support for that government. For the SNP to allow Labour to push Trident through with Tory support, and then the SNP revert to supporting the Labour government in office, would be a betrayal of the Scottish people. To me, there has not been absolute clarity in our response on this issue. It must be given.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • 47% Of Spain’s Electricity Made By Renewables In March

      Almost half of Spain’s electricity in March was generated by renewable sources — mostly wind and hydroelectric. About 22.5% was from wind and 17.5% from hydro, with the rest produced by solar PV, solar thermal, and thermal renewables.

  • Finance

    • Chaos and Hegemony

      The irony of history: Albeit the U.S. has lost the ability to steer the oil price – one of its central political leverages –, it has in another way been able to drastically strengthen its hegemony via the new prices set by the global market. For the high oil prices have multiplied the percentage share of oil trade within global trade, which caused massively higher demand for dollars and U.S. government bonds. As a result, for the foreseeable future the U.S. dollar will thereby remain the indisputable reserve currency.

      It is precisely here that we can identify the actual basis for U.S. dominance: By way of an unlimited creation of the dollar as the globe’s reserve currency, the U.S. constitutes the only economy in the world that can finance several mega-projects at once – such as the bailing-out of banks and gigantic defense spending – through public debt and the issuing of government bonds.

    • How Wall Street captured Washington’s effort to rein in banks

      Intense lobbying of regulators, many of them veterans of the industry themselves, helped ensure that practices the Dodd-Frank law was meant to stop would remain in place.

    • With Looming Financial War, Bitcoin Ushers in Peaceful Insurrection

      Britain, France, Germany and Italy recently announced that they would be joining the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), just as the BRICS nations are shifting away from US dollar world reserve hegemony. This is another blow to the US led financial order, deepening a loss of confidence in its leadership among its European allies. In a recent interview on the Keiser report, former Goldman Sachs director and author of All the President’s Bankers, Nomi Prins pointed out how the recent US conflict with Russia is a manufactured aggression all about trying to maintain its financial supremacy in the face of inevitable decline. Prins described this as a crisis of the world order established after World War II and pointed to how a new cold war is brewing.

    • The ‘Netflix tax’ – Honest Joe and the big tax lie

      With corporate tax minimisation in the news, the Government is considering ways to claw back at least some money from easy targets. And it is taking us for fools in the process.

      The Government is considering a range of measures in next month’s budget which it says will restore integrity to the tax system and ensure billions of dollars in extra revenue. A key measure will be to ensure that the 10% GST is charged on video downloads and streaming – a so-called ‘Netflix tax’.

      Treasurer Joe Hockey has been meeting with state treasurers in Canberra in an unsuccessful attempt to come to new arrangements on how the GST – which goes to the states – should be shared. Everyone, unsurprisingly, wants a bigger share of the pie, so it seems like the only answer is to increase the size of that pie.

      [...]

      Don’t hold your breath on that one. It’s all bullshit. Google and Apple and Microsoft – and local companies like News Limited and BHP – have been ripping us all off for years with clever international tax minimisation schemes that take advantage of different taxation rates in different companies.

  • Censorship

    • Toronto church says it won’t allow Ukrainian-born pianist to perform

      A Ukrainian-born pianist who has been barred from performing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra says she’ll be giving a free concert in Toronto Friday night – but now that show appears to be in doubt.

    • Russia’s Missing Article: Censorship, Prudence, Or A Win For Moscow’s Troll Army?

      MOSCOW — For three straight days last weekend, the employees of the Novaya Buryatia newspaper in southern Siberia used scissors to remove an article from 50,000 copies of the weekly before it could be distributed.

    • EDITORIAL: School-sponsored censorship isn’t free speech

      If you believe certain kinds of expression must be regulated or prohibited, you don’t support free speech.

      Unfortunately, we live in an era of hypersensitivity, where intolerance reigns under the guise of tolerance, and where the exercise of truly free speech has become an increasingly risky proposition. And you’d be hard pressed to find worse free-speech hypocrisy than what passes for discourse on college campuses.

    • Pakistani University Students Protest Against State Censorship Over Balochistan

      The hashtags were used to share images of students holding up placards and posters, protesting the state’s decision to have the “Unsilencing Balochistan” session cancelled. The posters were emblazoned with slogans such as “talking about a province is not anti-state” and “you don’t believe in freedom of speech if you don’t believe in it for those who disagree with you.”

    • Deafening silence
    • The fastest way to spread extremism is with the censor’s boot

      The Charlie Hebdo killings have prompted a clampdown. But history teaches that openness and debate are the most effective weapons in the battle of ideas

    • Ronnie Screwvala: Censorship Should Not be One Person’s View

      Ronnie Screwvala, former filmmaker and the founder of UTV group, believes an interactive dialogue between the industry and the censor board can solve a lot of problems.

    • Are the World’s Biggest Internet Companies Under the Turkish President’s Thumb?

      Twitter and YouTube were blocked in Turkey once again April 6, sparking plenty of fanfare across social networks.

      This time around, the block was imposed after the mass circulation of photos from a hostage crisis that ended with the death of government prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz and two leftist militants on March 31.

    • Turkey’s Online Censorship

      The Turkish government’s unrelenting crackdown on free speech continues unabated. On Tuesday, Google narrowly avoided being banned in the country after it complied with a court order to remove links to a photograph showing militants holding a gun to the head of a prosecutor.

    • Poland marks 25 years since lifting of censorship

      With the closure of the office came the end of censorship in Poland. Up until then, all forms of public communication were controlled, including press announcements such as obituaries, as well as posters.

    • China Threatens Sina Corp. Over Insufficient Censorship

      China’s top Internet regulator threatened to shut down the news services of one of China’s most popular social media and online news companies if it doesn’t fix problems with inadequate censorship and the spreading of false information.

    • Sina faces suspension over lack of censorship

      Chinese web giant Sina will face suspension of its Internet news services if it fails to improve censorship of illegal content, authorities have warned.

      The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) summoned Sina leaders to a meeting late on Friday over “massive numbers of public complaints about its law violations”.

    • Turkey Twitter ban to be lifted after site complies with court ruling

      Twitter has complied with Turkey’s request to remove photographs of an Istanbul prosecutor held at gunpoint by far-left militants and a ban on the micro-blogging site will be lifted very shortly, a senior Turkish official has said.

      “Twitter has agreed to shut down accounts and remove images relating to last week’s hostage-taking. The web site will reopen to access very shortly,” the official told Reuters.

    • ‘Great Cannon’ Is China’s New Weapon That Shoots Down Internet Sites

      That’s according to a report from Citizen Lab — an ICT, security and human rights lab based within the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Citizen Lab looked into these recent attacks and identified ‘Great Cannon’, a tool built to intercept data and redirect it to specific sites, as the attack system responsible for them.

    • The NSA Uses A Tool Similar To The One That China Used To Take Down GitHub

      The Chinese government’s massive attack on GitHub at the end of March, which directed massive amounts of traffic at its servers in an attempt to overwhelm them, was thought to have been accomplished by simply diverting traffic from what is known as China’s Great Firewall. Now researchers from the academic think tank Citizen Lab have found that China actually intercepted foreign traffic flowing into Chinese tech titan Baidu to attack targeted sites—a weaponized process that the researchers have dramatically termed “the Great Cannon.” And it turns out the tech used in this interception technique is startlingly similar to tech already developed by the NSA and its British equivalent, GCHQ.

    • China weaponizes its Great Firewall into the GREAT FIRE CANNON, menaces entire globe

      China has upgraded the website-blocking systems on its borders, dubbed The Great Firewall, so it can blast foreign businesses and orgs off the internet.

      Researchers hailing from the University of Toronto, the International Computer Science Institute, the University of California Berkeley, and Princeton University, have confirmed what we’ve all suspected: China is hijacking web traffic entering the Middle Kingdom to overpower sites critical of the authoritarian state.

    • Parliament cancels Mohammed cartoonist visit

      The Finnish parliament has cancelled a discussion event where the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, known for his depictions of the prophet Mohammed. The Secretary General of the Finnish parliament said that the cancellation was made on Security Intelligence Police advice.

  • Privacy

    • Congress must end mass NSA surveillance with next Patriot Act vote

      In less than 60 days, Congress – whether they like it or not – will be forced to decide if the NSA’s most notorious mass surveillance program lives or dies. And today, over 30 civil liberties organizations launched a nationwide call-in campaign urging them to kill it.

    • Patriot Act: Civil liberties groups seize chance to end notorious NSA surveillance program

      A campaign has been set up by more than 30 civil liberties organisations in an attempt to bring an end to a controversial section of the Patriot Act that allows the NSA and FBI to conduct suspicionless mass surveillance.

      Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was first passed through Congress following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, is set to expire on 1 June unless the US Congress votes for it to be reauthorised.

    • New Coalition Site Fight215.org Launches to Amplify Opposition to the NSA’s Mass Surveillance

      A coalition of 34 organizations from across the political spectrum is launching Fight215.org today to help concerned individuals contact lawmakers and demand an end to NSA’s unconstitutional mass surveillance under the Patriot Act.

    • John Oliver presses Edward Snowden on whether he read all leaked NSA material

      Edward Snowden avoided saying whether he had read every NSA document he handed over to journalists in an interview with comedian John Oliver on Sunday, as the HBO host posed uncomfortable questions to the NSA whistleblower in Moscow.

    • NSA holds info over US citizens like loaded gun, but says ‘trust me’ – Snowden

      The National Security Agency has a gun aimed at the head of each and every American, Edward Snowden says in a new interview, and they’re being asked to accept the NSA’s vast surveillance operations in the name of counterterrorism.

    • Phone Surveillance Revelation Should Prompt Reassessment Of NSA Spying

      Does evidence of a decades-old surveillance program throw out the case many public officials have made for the modern surveillance state?

      Since Edward Snowden first leaked documents about secret National Security Agency (NSA) programs, government officials have defended them in the name of September 11 and national security. Again and again, we heard that these programs were built in the wake of that tragic day to “connect the dots” so no event like that would ever occur again. They addressed issues of national security, not day-to-day policing.

    • The DEA collected call metadata way before the NSA did

      Apparently, the NSA’s massive surveillance program wasn’t a first: it was modeled after a precursor that ran from 1992 until 2013. According to USA Today, that program was called USTO, because it monitored almost every American’s calls from the US to other countries. It was a joint initiative by the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which began as a way to keep tabs on Colombian drug cartels and their supply routes. Since then, it grew in scope (thanks in part to a powerful computer provided by the Pentagon) to cover all international calls made to around 116 countries worldwide, including Canada, Mexico, parts of Asia and Europe, and most of Central and Southern America. The group was only dissolved after Edward Snowden went public with the NSA’s secrets in 2013.

    • New anti-NSA coalition pledges to ‘Fight 215’
    • Website Launched to Fight NSA Data Surveillance
    • The Rand Paul campaign is selling an “NSA Spy Cam Blocker” for your laptop

      Most laptops today have a built-in camera above the display. And most of those have a small light next to them that is supposed to turn on to alert the user when the camera is active. But a couple of years ago, researchers discovered that this doesn’t always work; hackers can activate the camera on certain MacBook models (and probably some other laptops) without enabling the light and tipping off the user.

    • Rand Paul sells “NSA spy cam blocker” as presidential bid fundraiser

      Bid announcement video taken off YouTube due to copyright claim over a song.

    • Rand Paul sells ‘NSA spy cam blocker’
    • Would You Care If Your Private Parts Were Seen by the Government?

      Turns out, many Americans don’t really know who former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is, and they seem to know even less about the shadowy government surveillance programs he went to lengths to reveal.

    • CanTheySeeMyDick.com offers impressive insight into NSA spying tactics

      CanTheySeeMyDick.com uses Oliver’s interview and revelation that private photos of American genitalia are now available to the government as the nexus around which to inform people about the varying laws, practices, and extralegal maneuvers that would grant access to citizens’ information. It’s a great tongue-in-cheek approach that runs with Oliver’s elaborate dick joke and makes it much easier to understand the prevalence and reach that has been afforded to the intelligence community and its surveillance capabilities.

    • NSA Has Set Aside A Special Room For Watching Porn

      Even though the National Security Agency has taken a lot of flak for its electronic spying programs the agency does play a vital role in the maintenance of national security. It sifts through vast swathes of data of all kinds to find clues about potential terrorist plots. Sometimes those plots could be hidden inside porn and that’s why the National Security Agency has set aside a whole room just for watching porn.

    • NSA analysts are being paid to watch a LOT of porn

      There’s been a lot of concern about how intelligence agencies around the world have been covertly snooping on private emails, instant message communications and phone calls, but here’s something you may not have realised.

    • As Hillary Announces For President, Four Questions She Should Answer

      But she has also said she would support reforms to ensure that surveillance doesn’t go too far and that the National Security Agency should be “more transparent” about its practices. She has also called for a “full, comprehensive discussion” about the NSA’s spying program. “That’s the discussion that has to happen in a calm atmosphere without people defending everything we’ve done and people absolutely opposing everything we’ve done,” she said in a 2013 appearance. “And we’re not having that conversation yet.”

    • Former NSA Chief Keith Alexander Is Speaking in Seattle Tonight

      1. Keith, why is the NSA collecting our dick pics? Are you collecting our tit pics too?

      2. I would like to collect it all, Keith: all of your personal and family photos! Okay, Keith?

      3. Cool if the government listens in next time you call your wife, Keith?

      4. Still convinced Snowden is a secret Russian spy, not a whistleblower, Keith?

      5. Why should we trust you, Keith, or your successor?

      6. Who was the person, Keith, who you called the most times last year? Who did you call on your birthday, Keith, and at what time of day? How long did each of you speak, Keith? In fact, would you mind sharing with me, Keith, your personal cell phone number, all the numbers you dialed, and the duration of all incoming and outgoing calls?*

    • 72% of Brits concerned about online privacy since Snowden leaks

      New research suggests nearly three quarters of British adults are worried about the distribution of their personal information online, with concerns including hackers and unauthorized access to data.

      The figures, compiled by pollster YouGov, found that 32 percent of respondents would be happy to pay for extra online security to ensure their date was protected. A further 29 percent felt it came down to the individual to take responsibility for protecting their data.

      There has been a huge rise in the level of consumer mistrust in tech firms since NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 the UK and US governments were accessing consumer data without permission.

    • A wrong turn at the NSA can bring trouble

      It could have been worse. Authorities believe the two people who were shot by NSA police last week outside the agency’s headquarters on Fort Meade got there by mistake.

      The driver, identified by the FBI as 27-year-old Ricky Shawatza Hall of Baltimore, was pronounced dead at the scene. A passenger was shot in the chest and taken to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center; the passenger’s identity and condition have not been available.

      Authorities have released few details of the incident, but the FBI was quick to rule out terrorism. Police say Hall and the passenger were traveling in an SUV that was reported stolen from a man at a motel in nearby Elkridge shortly before they arrived at the NSA gate off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway Monday morning.

    • Strengthen privacy rights

      A major piece of business that Congress failed to complete last year was to strengthen the privacy rights of Americans by curtailing government spying on them. It should be at the top of the agenda this year.

      A key argument for the wide latitude allowed the government under current law to seize private records without a court order is that such power is necessary to protect against terrorist activities.

    • Snowden journalist visits U., says goal of the NSA is to ‘eliminate all private communications’

      Why else would someone lock the bedroom or bathroom door? Use passwords to protect their social media accounts? Or why would they tell their spouses or psychiatrists things they wouldn’t tell others?

    • Greenwald talks Secrecy and Snowden
    • Glenn Greenwald speaks on government surveillance in a digital age
    • Soapbox: Don’t let government monitoring cripple freedom

      When the topic of the disclosures of programs of mass surveillance comes up in conversation, people often proclaim since they are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the NSA document leak story involving Edward Snowden, declares that people who take this position are “Engaged in an act of self-depreciation.” He notes that what they are effectively saying is, “I have agreed to make myself such a harmless, unthreatening and uninteresting person, that I don’t fear to have the government know what I’m doing.”

      [...]

      Michel Foucault, a 20th Century French philosopher, realized that the Panopticon could be used in any institution as a means of control: schools, hospitals, factories, work places, etc. Foucault posited that the means of control previously used by societies — punishment, imprisonment, killing dissidents, forced obedience to a particular party — were no longer needed, that mass-surveillance is a much more subtle and effective means of control than brute force. Eventually, Foucault surmised that surveillance is longer even needed, because people begin to police their own behavior.

    • Secrecy, surveillance threaten democracy, says Greenwald

      The university invited the lawyer-turned-journalist, known for his work on an award-winning series in British newspaper The Guardian that detailed global surveillance programs, to speak during a week devoted to exploring surveillance by the U.S. government.

    • Utah data centre critical to help the NSA ‘eliminate all private communications’, says Snowden journalist

      The journalist and ex-lawyer who came to prominence by helping Edward Snowden to disclose the secrets of the National Security Agency has spoken of ‘government inside the government’ and the critical role of the NSA’s ‘Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center’ at a gathering in Utah, describing the plant as having an “ominous role in the surveillance state”.

    • Glenn Greenwald Talks about Government Surveillance in Utah
    • Glenn Greenwald to speak at University of Utah
    • Privacy Board Will Do ‘Deep Dive’ on NSA, CIA Practices

      In a brisk 30-minute meeting on Wednesday in Washington, members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board read prepared statements about a “work plan” to perform two “deep dives” on agency practices that lean on the order.

    • PCLOB Takes on Executive Order 12333 Surveillance
    • The Investigation into 12333 Begins

      The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) voted 4–1 yesterday to conduct reviews of how Executive Order 12333 is used in counterterrorism investigations by the CIA and NSA. The PCLOB’s plan to investigate two surveillance programs conducted under the wide-ranging executive order will result in three reports — two classified, one public — that it hopes to complete by the end of this year.

    • Usual Suspects Oppose Maine Bill to Take on NSA: Attorney General, Law Enforcement Lobbyists

      The usual suspects came out in opposition of a Maine bill that would turn off support and resources to the NSA in the Pine Tree State during a committee hearing last week.

      Maine Attorney General Janet Mills and law enforcement lobbyists expressed reservations about LD531 during a Senate Committee on Judiciary hearing, saying it could hinder police from catching child pornographers and other dangerous criminals. Their arguments echoed those of law enforcement interests in Montana and Alaska.

    • Our intelligence apparatus, operating in the dark

      At the time, President Obama resisted calls to investigate lawless intelligence practices, insisting that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Unfortunately, we know where the road forward led. The NSA spied on citizens. The CIA spied on Congress. And the American people, as Hayes warned, became further desensitized to the idea of an intelligence apparatus that operates in secret and plays by its own set of rules — or perhaps none at all.

    • Asked How He Would Handle Being Blamed for Terrorist Attacks After Limiting NSA Power, Here’s What Rand Paul Said

      Paul said eliminating the mass collection of data on American citizens doesn’t mean putting an end to our intelligence agencies.

    • Spying on the U.S. Submarine That Spies For the NSA and CIA

      From March to September 2014, the U.S. submarine’s 152-man crew cruised the deeps of the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Arabian Gulf, earning a earning a coveted Battle “E” for their efficiency in doing all the fleet had asked of them. Which involved … what, exactly? They covered 34,000 nautical miles, participated in one multinational exercise, and made port calls in Portugal, Spain, Bahrain, and Gibraltar, according to official Navy reports.

    • Glenn Greenwald in North Texas: NSA Surveillance Program is ‘Antithesis’ of Fourth Amendment

      Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and journalist who became a left-wing celebrity for his articles helping whistle-blower Edward Snowden expose the NSA’s mass-surveillance program, admits enjoying the reaction when critics discovered he would be in North Texas to appear on Glenn Beck’s right-wing radio show—and then to address the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis.

      Talking Friday to about 250 people at a luncheon meeting of the NCPA, a Dallas think tank that’s headed now by tea party hero Allen West, Greenwald said of the kerfuffle that was particularly created by his Beck appearance: “I love it.” He recalled trading barbs with “people on Twitter who thought it was a terrible thing to do.” But, he added, “I’ve made it a point to find common ground. I find that’s a healthy thing to do.”

    • Talking About Section 215: A Readers’ Guide

      Media coverage of John Oliver’s critique about the lack of discussion surrounding government surveillance programs seems to prove his point. Much, if not most, of the attention given to Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight has focused on Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden instead of focusing on the fact that the law governing one of the most heavily-criticized surveillance programs is up for potential reauthorization in less than two months. We’re talking about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the provision allowing the NSA to collect vast quantities of Americans’ phone records.

    • Snapchat releases report showing how many times the government asked for user data

      The report covers requests from Nov. 1, 2014 to Feb. 28, 2015. Over that time, it is said authorities asked for information on Snapchat users 403 times. Of that total, 375 requests were from the U.S. government and 28 were from foreign governments. The United Kingdom requested data the second most.

    • Surveillance Envy Drives France to Intrusive Law of Its Own

      Never a people to let Americans one-up them on anything, French lawmakers are considering a Patriot Act-ish bill that one civil liberties group describes as “a naked expansion of surveillance powers.” The measure, which already has preliminary approval, would justify snooping on a variety of grounds far beyond the anti-terrorism concerns driving much of the country’s political activity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Besides security, the proposed Projet de Loi Relatif au Renseignement allows for deep government intrusions into online life to achieve economic, scientific, and international relations goals.

    • Allison: Red herrings and Clinton’s emails

      Sunday on Face the Nation, someone made the absurd comparison of Hillary Clinton to Richard Nixon, as if her deleted emails had any similarity to Nixon in cahoots with Kissinger in that secret war of carpet bombing Cambodia.

    • Powerful Prose Examines Powerful Surveillance

      Oklahoma City University’s Powerful Prose series will continue with a presentation on the book “No Place to Hide,” a book written by Glenn Greenwald about accused classified intelligence leaker Edward Snowden. OCU law professor Art LeFrancois will discuss the book at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, April 30.

      The presentation is free to the public and will be held at Full Circle Bookstore, the series co-sponsor, in the 50 Penn Place shopping center at 1900 Northwest Expressway.

    • Original U.S. Phone Record Dragnet Finally Faces Lawsuit

      The Drug Enforcement Administration’s pioneering and purportedly discontinued dragnet pulled records from pliable phone companies for two decades without court review using administrative subpoenas.

    • Human Rights Watch Sues DEA Over Bulk Collection of Americans’ Telephone Records

      Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan organization that fights human rights abuses across the globe, filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration late Tuesday for illegally collecting records of its telephone calls to certain foreign countries as part of yet another government bulk surveillance program. The group is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has launched a series of legal challenges against unconstitutional government surveillance.

    • CISA: New “Cybersecurity” Bill Is About Surveillance, Not Security

      Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) is trumpeting a major Senate cyber bill that he claims is better at protecting privacy. Burr, who is chairman the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, hails this bipartisan measure which was recently approved by his panel, as taking the first step in cracking down on the theft of personal data and intellectual property. Elaborating, he goes on to insist that the bill would create “a cybersecurity information-sharing environment that works much like a neighborhood watch program–allowing all participants to get a better understanding of the current cybersecurity threats that may be used against them.”

    • UK spied on CFK gov’t over Malvinas

      President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government has vowed to respond to documents that allegedly show how the British government was engaged in surveillance and cyber operations against the Argentine authorities and military officials and attempted to shape public opinion against the country’s sovereignty claims over the Malvinas Islands.

    • Scioli: UK spying is ‘violation of our rights’

      Following Defence Minister Agustín Rossi’s brief comments on Friday, Buenos Aires Governor Daniel Scioli yesterday was the highest-ranking Victory Front (FpV) official to respond to recently released documents that suggest British espionage against Argentine and military officials over the Malvinas Islands, considering them serious and “a violation against the privacy and the rights of our country within the framework of freedom and democracy.”

    • WATCH: John Oliver Employs Brilliant Tactic to Get Edward Snowden to Explain Why NSA Surveillance Matters

      Yeupp, the government can and does collect dick pics.

      This is not a trivial matter. Sunday night, Oliver devoted the entire half hour of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” to the matter of domestic surveillance, and the upcoming vote in Congress about whether to reauthorize the Patriot Act, including its provision allowing the government to collect our private information.

      The trouble is that Americans seem really ill-informed about the whole matter of domestic surveillance, as Oliver illustrates with on-the-street interviews. They also seem not to know exactly who whistleblower Edward Snowden is.

    • Paul G. Buchanan: Hager and co’s bombshells fizzle – not fire

      The slow drip feed of classified NSA material taken by Edward Snowden and published by journalists Glen Greenwald, Nicky Hager, David Fisher and others in outlets such as The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald caused a stir when first published.

      Revelations of mass surveillance and bulk collection of telephone and email data of ordinary citizens in the Five Eyes democracies and detailed accounts of how the NSA and its companion agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK spy on friend and foe alike, including trade partners and the personal telephones of the German prime minister and Indonesian president, caused both popular and diplomatic uproars.

    • US Sheriff’s Office Abuses Stingray Cellphone Spy Technology – Rights Group

      The American Civil Liberties Union said that the Erie County Sheriff’s Office in the US state of New York used invasive cellphone tracking devices called Stingrays to spy on local residents without a search warrant.

    • Baltimore police secretly tracked (at least) 4,300 cellphones
    • New York police caught lying over Stingray use, spying without court oversight

      In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks of nearly two years ago, the NSA, FBI, and even local police have hammered a consistent drumbeat of trust. Time and time again, at every level of government, local to national, elected officials and appointed commissioners have promised that the cutting-edge tools of mass surveillance used to hoover your personal information are actually tightly controlled and used only under appropriate conditions. Unfortunately, available evidence continues to blow holes in this narrative, most recently in New York State.

    • The Government Has Been Tracking Our Calls Since the Early 1990s

      The bulk collection of phone data goes back to 1992, with a DEA program that inspired the NSA

    • DEA sniffed MASSIVE AMOUNTS of phone records before Snowden’s intervention
    • Opinion: The unnoticed expansion of domestic surveillance

      Programs such as PRISM for foreign surveillance and domestic wiretapping drew huge outcry. At the time, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff accused the U.S. on the floor of the United Nations of “a breach of international law and an affront” to national sovereignty. Similar claims were made about domestic programs, especially since the their capabilities, let alone their use, were unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

    • When it Comes Ending Spying, Congress is a Waste of Time

      More and more it appears that focusing on Congress to stop federal spying is a complete waste of time.

      Even if Congress were to pass substantive reforms or allow provisions of the Patriot Act authorizing bulk phone surveillance to expire – and this seems highly unlikely – a recently declassified court order indicates spying would likely continue.

    • Edward Snowden Explains Why You Should Use Passphrases, Not Passwords

      It can’t be overstated how important it is to use strong passwords, given that we still haven’t figured this mess out. And until we do, PSAs like this one stay important. And it could hardly come from a more relevant source. Edward Snowden famously leaked key details about the NSA’s mass surveillance, so he knows a thing or two about what makes a system secure or not.

    • First Step Against the Federal Surveillance State – Texas Bill Would Require Warrant for Location Tracking

      A Texas bill that would prohibit law enforcement from obtaining location data from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases, representing an important first step in addressing the growing federal surveillance state will receive an important House committee hearing this week.

    • Fact: Facebook tracks non-users – says ‘fix already underway’

      Facebook says it’s begun fixing a bug that tracks web users even when they’re not registered on the social network. However, it rejected other accusations presented in a report by Belgian scholars questioning the legality of the revised privacy policy.

    • The Feds Want a Back Door Into Your Computer. Again.

      One fine day in 1991, an ambitious senator named Joe Biden introduced legislation declaring that telecommunications companies “shall ensure” that their hardware includes backdoors for government eavesdropping. Biden’s proposal was followed by the introduction of the Clipper Chip by the National Security Agency (NSA) and a remarkable bill, approved by a House of Representatives committee in 1997, that would have outlawed encryption without back doors for the feds.

    • New Zealand: Sham inquiry established into spying revelations

      The government’s Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn announced on March 26 that she would investigate complaints made by the Green Party and others “over alleged interception of communications of New Zealanders working or travelling in the South Pacific by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).”

      The aim of the inquiry is to contain the damage to the government and the political establishment more broadly from revelations of the GCSB’s illegal and anti-democratic activities.

    • U.S. Began Bulk Collection of Phone Call Data in 1992

      An explosive new report reveals the federal government secretly tracked billions of U.S. phone calls years before the 9/11 attacks. According to USA Today, the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration collected bulk data for phone calls in as many as 116 countries deemed to have a connection with drug trafficking. The program began in 1992 under President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, George W. Bush, authorized the National Security Agency to gather logs of Americans’ phone calls in 2001. This program served as a blueprint for NSA mass surveillance. We speak with Brad Heath, the USA Today investigative reporter who broke the story.

    • Apple and the Self-Surveillance State

      So, here’s my pathetic version of a grand insight: wearables like the Apple watch actually serve a very different function — indeed, almost the opposite function — from that served by previous mobile devices. A smartphone is useful mainly because it lets you keep track of things; wearables will be useful mainly because they let things keep track of you.

    • Apple preparing for ‘major, major’ datacenter expansion in Oregon – report

      Apple is set to follow through on expansion plans for its $250 million datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, a Wednesday report suggests, after the Oregon legislature resolved a tax issue that could have tacked millions of dollars onto Apple’s bills in the future.

    • Encryption Becomes a Part of Journalists’ Toolkit

      When whistleblower Edward Snowden used an email encryption program called PGP to contact documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, only a tiny fraction of journalists used it. The precaution, designed to scramble messages so only the sender and receiver can read them, was essential for Snowden to leak the information.

    • U.S. government monitored phone calls to Canadians in sweeping 1990s surveillance program

      The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed, USA Today newspaper reported today.

    • Baltimore’s transgender community mourns one of their own, slain by police
    • Our say: Hush-hush installation needs better signs

      There’s a lot we may never know about the odd incident last week in which two men were shot, one fatally, while allegedly trying to ram the gate at the employees-only entrance to the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade. But there does seem to be one contributing factor you’d think authorities could fix quickly – a poorly marked entrance ramp from Baltimore-Washington Parkway.

    • Lobbyists for Spies Appointed To Oversee Spying

      Who’s keeping watch of the National Security Agency? In Congress, the answer in more and more cases is that the job is going to former lobbyists for NSA contractors and other intelligence community insiders.

      A wave of recent appointments has placed intelligence industry insiders into key Congressional roles overseeing intelligence gathering. The influx of insiders is particularly alarming because lawmakers in Washington are set to take up a series of sensitive surveillance and intelligence issues this year, from reform of the Patriot Act to far-reaching “information sharing” legislation.

      After the first revelations of domestic surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, President Obama defended the spying programs by claiming they were “subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate.” But as Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., and other members of Congress have pointed out, there is essentially a “two-tiered” system for oversight, with lawmakers and staff on specialized committees, such as the House and Senate committees on Intelligence and Homeland Security, controlling the flow of information and routinely excluding other Congress members, even those who have asked for specific information relating to pending legislation.

    • Data privacy: the tide is turning in Europe – but is it too little, too late?

      Amazon Dash – the company’s single purpose internet-connected ordering button – may soon be blackening our skies with drones delivering loo rolls and detergent. And so, the relentless march of technology – not to mention cheap labour, unthinking consumerism and scandalous environmental devastation – goes on.

    • ‘Citizenfour’ keeps government spying right where it should be: In the public spotlight

      Though “Citizenfour” (2014) is not a horror film – rather, it’s a documentary – it ranks among the most frightening films I have ever seen because of its unyielding revelations of the U.S. government’s spying programs and the implications of those reports.

    • Class action privacy lawsuit filed against Facebook in Austria

      Case lead by privacy campaigner Max Schrems sees 25,000 users sue social network for alleged illegal tracking of their data and its involvement in the NSA’s surveillance programme

    • Facebook Sued By 25,000 Users Over Privacy

      Facebook is being sued in Austria over alleged privacy violations and claimed participation in the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) PRISM programme.

      An Austrian law graduate called Max Schrems is leading the class action lawsuit on behalf of around 25,000 Facebook users based in Europe and beyond.

    • Facebook preps for class action lawsuit as angry EU mob lawyer up

      A class action against Facebook over alleged breaches of European privacy laws is being heard in a Vienna district court today.

      Austrian law graduate Max Schrems and 25,000 other Facebook users are suing the social network. They allege that Facebook violated European citizens’ “fundamental rights” (defined in the European Convention on Human Rights) by transferring their personal data to the US National Security Agency (NSA).

    • Fees After Victory in Cybersecurity FOIA Case

      A nonprofit group is entitled to attorney fees from the government for its efforts to obtain a presidential order on cybersecurity, a federal judge ruled.

    • Congress Returns Next Week With A Tech-Heavy Agenda

      These are all issues Congress has tried and failed to address before. Patent reform died in the Senate last spring, controversial cybersecurity legislation never saw a floor vote last year and a NSA reform bill could not pass a Senate procedural vote last December.

    • US govt bans Intel from selling chips to China’s supercomputer boffins

      The US government has blocked Intel from shipping high-end Xeon processors to China’s supercomputer builders – and other American chip giants are banned, too.

      Intel confirmed to The Register last night it was refused permission to sell the chips to the Middle Kingdom’s defense labs and other parts of its supercomputing industry.

    • Want to See Domestic Spying’s Future? Follow the Drug War

      The DEA’s newly revealed bulk collection of billions of American phone records on calls to 116 countries preceded the NSA’s similar program by years and may have even helped to inspire it, as reported in USA Today’s story Wednesday. And the program serves as a reminder that most of the legal battles between government surveillance efforts and the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections over the last decades have played out first on the front lines of America’s War on Drugs. Every surveillance test case in recent history, from beepers to cell phones to GPS tracking to drones—and now the feds’ attempts to puncture the bubble of cryptographic anonymity around Dark Web sites like the Silk Road—began with a narcotics investigation.

    • Report reveals US has carried out domestic electronic espionage on Mexico

      For more than two decades, the U.S. government has carried out domestic electronic espionage that has impacted hundreds of countries including Mexico, the USA Today reported Wednesday.

    • Why it’s so hard to create norms in cyberspace

      There are two plausible reasons. First, as Admiral Michael Rogers, the head of the NSA and Cyber Command has argued, norms create a basic structure for international political relations. If, for example, the U.S. is to deter cyberattack from other countries, and vice versa, all the countries involved need to reach a common agreement on basic questions such as what cyberattacks are, when they are acceptable and when not acceptable, and so on. Creating this kind of common understanding takes a lot of hard work building common norms of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, as Emanuel Adler’s research on arms control during the Cold War demonstrates.

    • To Promote an Open Internet, NSA Should Limit Data Collection

      The benefits of data collection “must be more clearly weighed against the potential damage to the normative commitments to an open and secure Internet,” writes Farrell, who urges intelligence-gathering agencies to “adopt a fundamental change of mind-set.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Australian government spends $4 million on ‘stop-the-boats’ telemovie

      The federal government has commissioned a $4.1m telemovie designed to dissuade asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat.

      The telemovie, set to be broadcast in refugee hotspots including Syria, Afghanistan and Iran, would include storylines about asylum seekers drowning at sea and feature the Australian navy, the ABC has reported.

    • Arrest Warrant Issued for Justin Bieber in Argentina

      An Argentine judge issued an arrest warrant for Justin Bieber on Friday (April 10), saying the singer failed to respond to summons related to allegations he ordered bodyguards to attack a photographer in 2013

      Judge Alberto Julio Banos ordered the “immediate detention” of Bieber and bodyguards Hugo Alcides Hesny and Terrence Reche Smalls.

    • Danish report: No need for whistleblower law

      Denmark does not need a special whistleblower law for public authorities, an expert committee has concluded.

    • This start-up promised 10,000 people eternal digital life—then it died

      Intellitar was selling its “immortality” service for $25 a month to people who wanted to create a digital doppelgänger that would live on even after their death. Customers uploaded a photo of themselves to Intellitar’s “Virtual Eternity” website, took a personality test, provided a voice sample and then trained their avatars’ “brains”—an artificial-intelligence engine—by feeding it stories, memories and photos. The result, the company said, was an animated avatar that your family, friends, and great-great-grandchildren could talk to, even after you went to the big database in the sky.

    • Spying on Muslims fosters distrust amongst community

      This past January, the U.S. Court of Appeals heard the oral argument for the Hassan v. City of New York case. What makes this case so special is that it has been the first case to ever challenge the New York City Police Department Muslim Surveillance Program. The United States National Security Agency controversy left America reeling — in June 2013, allegations arose that the NSA had been spying on millions of Americans every day through tapping of telecommunications networks (computer networks, telephones, the Internet, etc.) with the help of major companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft. Though this came to light through journalist Glenn Greenwald’s exposé revealing a partnership between Verizon and the NSA, it has been going on for years. It is a common suspicion that the revelation barely scratches the surface of all the surveillance that is likely going on, but Muslims have been sounding off on their loss of constitutional rights — and thereby the loss of every American’s constitutional rights — for years.

    • Philly PD Declares All Drivers To Be ‘Under Investigation’ While Denying Request For License Plate Reader Data

      More bad news has just arrived on the “We’re all not that terrible” PR front: according to Philly’s police department, each and every car owner whose vehicle’s license plate has had the misfortune of being scanned by the PD’s license plate readers is some sort of criminal. Charges TBD.

    • Wanted: Ten million Chinese students to “civilize” the Internet

      China wants to recruit 10 million young people, mostly university students belonging to the Communist Party’s youth wing, to “spread positive energy” on the Internet — in other words, to use social media to praise and defend the government.

    • Man who filmed cop killing fleeing suspect says an officer “told me to stop”

      The 23-year-old South Carolina man who used his phone to videotape a police officer fatally shooting a suspect in the back multiple times said Thursday that another officer who arrived on the scene ordered him to stop recording.

    • 8th Grader Faces Felony Charges For Changing Teacher’s Computer Background

      Eight-grader Domanik Green was arrested on felony charges in Holiday, Fla. Wednesday after breaking into his teacher’s computer to change the background picture to two men kissing.

    • 2009 DHS Document Says Border Patrol Can Search/Copy The Contents Of Your Device Just Because It Wants To

      FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock has scored another revealing document, this time from Customs and Border Protection. As we’re well aware, the US border isn’t technically considered to be part of the United States, at least not as far as the Constitution is concerned. All bets are off, 4th (and others) Amendment-wise. If you’re traveling with anything — whether its a vehicle, suitcase or laptop — expect it to be searched.

    • Southern California Deputies Caught on Video Beating Surrendering Man for More Than Two Minutes

      Knowing they were being video recorded by a news helicopter hovering above, Southern California deputies did not let that stop them from repeatedly punching and kicking a man who had already surrendered by lying flat on his stomach after he was tased earlier this afternoon.

      Up to nine San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies can be seen running up to the suspect to kick and punch him, angry at having been forced to chase him through the desert.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Protect Net Neutrality in India

      Internet is a global network, with total freedom. Well, that is soon going to change, unless you act now. While you are reading this, someone is trying to control what you see, read, download, listen or write on the internet by taking control over the sites you can access! Don’t wait for that moment to happen. Act now, and protect Net Neutrality by signing in for the petition.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Judge: IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Movie Pirate

        The filmmakers behind the action movie “Manny” have filed hundreds of lawsuits against BitTorrent pirates this year, but not all have been successful. In a prominent ruling Florida District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro refused to issue a subpoena, arguing that IP-address evidence is not enough to show who has downloaded a pirated movie.

      • 70% Of Fans Still Can’t Watch LA Dodgers Games On TV Thanks To Time Warner Cable

        Last year Time Warner Cable and the Los Angeles Dodgers struck a twenty-five year, $8.35 billion deal giving Time Warner Cable the exclusive broadcast rights to all Dodgers games in Los Angeles via its creatively-named regional sports network, Time Warner Cable SportsNet LA. Time Warner Cable then immediately turned around and demanded massive price hikes (rumored to be around $5 per subscriber) for any other pay TV provider that wanted to offer the channel. All of the regional cable operators (including AT&T, Cox, Dish and DirecTV) balked at the hike, resulting about 70% of fans in Dodgers territory being unable to watch the final six games of last season.

      • EFF Seeks DMCA Exemption to Preserve Abandoned Games

        The EFF and the Entertainment Software Alliance are going head-to-head over the need to preserve functionality in abandoned games. The EFF wants an exemption to the DMCA to keep games alive after its servers are closed down, but the ESA and its allies the MPAA and RIAA are vigorously opposing the digital rights group.

Links 10/4/2015: Linux 4.0 Imminent, ZFS On Linux Improved

Posted in News Roundup at 12:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opportunities and challenges of Open Source in Enterprise

    Today, open source is pervasive in enterprise IT, forming the foundation of many cloud services and applications.

    The open source community represents a vast pool of collaborative intellectual property, and it has become a fundamental part of businesses around the world and in Australia and New Zealand.

    “Open source is a great fit for any organisation that is looking to innovate more rapidly and effectively, and to save costs and increase the bottom line,” says Colin McCabe, senior manager, Services and Training, Red Hat.

  • Coders: 5G networks and open source code

    This week on Coders, RCR CEO and Editorial Director Jeff Mucci digs into evolving 5G cellular standards, software and proof of concept deployments with co-host Victor Agreda.

  • Couchbase CEO: the real rationale for enterprise open source

    Open source allows for a more natural adoption approach within the enterprise. It is free and generally easy to download, install, and get started with. This allows easy exploration of and experimentation with new technologies and allows enterprises to get comfortable with the software on smaller, non-mission-critical projects before any financial commitment is required.

  • Sirius: an Open Source Competitor to Siri, Cortana, Google Now

    Sirius is an open source, customizable system that can be commanded through vocal input. It has been built by University of Michigan researchers and is similar to Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Now. According to University of Michigan, Sirius “is designed to spark a new generation of intelligent personal assistants” for wearables and other devices.”

  • How the Syria Airlift Project is Using Open Source Dronecode for Humanitarian Aid

    In March of 2014 I found myself on the Turkish-Syrian border, doing research among Syrian refugees. The stories I heard were horrific. Mass sieges were in effect; the Syrian government and brutal militias were starving out entire neighborhoods, and the government appeared to be deliberately targeting hospitals and doctors. Smuggling medical supplies into opposition-held areas was punishable by torture and death. Syrians were besides themselves, trying to find some way to get food and medicine into these besieged areas. They asked me why the US did nothing.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome Web Store Gives Bad Extensions the Boot

        Google has given its Chrome Store a spring cleaning, ridding it of more than 200 browser add-ons and extensions that may have been delivering spyware and malware to users. “Obviously, they need to put more work into screening of uploads to the Chrome Store if it should be considered a trusted source,” noted Martin Zetterlund, founder of ScrapeSentry.

      • Google Chrome Will Soon Work Better For Linux HiDPI Systems

        A few months back I wrote about the poor state of Chrome/Chromium HiDPI support on Linux but fortunately with the latest unstable web browser code these issues appear to have been resolved.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • A community distribution of OpenStack

      In this interview with Red Hat’s Alvaro Lopez Ortega, we learn a little bit about RDO, a community distribution of OpenStack which is designed to make it easy to install on operating systems like Fedora and CentOS. Alvaro is presenting at OpenStack Live next week, where he’ll share both some technical details on RDO as well as a little bit about the community that makes it happen.

    • Connectors to Hadoop Promise to Simplify Big Data Tasks

      Over time, it only had to become easier to leverage the open source Hadoop project, which has been the driving technology behind much of the Big Data trend. At one point, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store.

    • First OpenStack Kilo RCs Debut

      The first Release Candidate (RCs) for the upcoming OpenStack Kilo release are now out. I’ve seen the RC for Nova (https://github.com/openstack/nova/tree/proposed/kilo), and the RC for Trove at: https://github.com/openstack/trove/tree/proposed/kilo with more set to follow.

    • PLUMgrid Launches Cloud Networking for OpenStack Kilo

      The OpenStack Kilo milestone release is several weeks away, but networking vendor PLUMgrid is already prepared for it. This week, PLUMgrid announced the release of its ONS (OpenStack Networking Suite) 3.0, compatible with OpenStack Kilo. The new ONS 3.0 platform also provides new tools for enabling networking in OpenStack clouds.

    • Piston Pivots Beyond OpenStack with CloudOS

      One size rarely fits all. That’s a lesson OpenStack vendor Piston Cloud Computing is showing it understands quite well with its CloudOS 4.0 release. Prior to CloudOS 4.0, Piston’s primary cloud server platform was called Piston OpenStack, with the most recent update being the 3.5 release, which debuted in September 2014.

    • 55.555 downloads of ownCloud in a box

      Recently I passed a magic number with my ownCloud in a box appliance. It hit the five fives, 55.555 total downloads, on SUSE Studio. It is the most popular download there. I would never have imagined that so many people would be interested in it and use it when I started with this. Amazing.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • ODF in the age of Big Data

      One may notice that the points listed above loosely match the main points usually mentioned when discussing the benefits of ODF in the more standard settings of the desktop. This is not surprising, but it was not necessarily intended; if anything this is a testimony to the value of a standard like ODF and its importance. The key point here is that when it comes to the cloud and big data, ODF is both a factor of transparency and innovation. This is something worth promoting and is a potential path to renewed success of ODF in the future.

    • One year old: Document Liberation Project

      The Document Liberation Project only was founded last year officially and now can see at least it’s first birthday. Not yet picked up much steam from new contributors so far, but then already serving e.g. users of Calligra, with libraries like LibRevenge, LibOdfGen, LibWpd, LibWpg, LibWps, LibVisio, LibEtonyek etc., to read in data from files in WordPerfect, MS Works, MS Visio, and Keynote formats.

  • CMS

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • JavaScript All the Way Down

      JavaScript originally was developed at Netscape in 1995, first under the name Mocha, and then as LiveScript. Soon (after Netscape and Sun got together; nowadays, it’s the Mozilla Foundation that manages the language) it was renamed JavaScript to ride the popularity wave, despite having nothing to do with Java. In 1997, it became an industry standard under a fourth name, ECMAScript. The most common current version of JavaScript is 5.1, dated June 2011, and version 6 is on its way. (However, if you want to use the more modern features, but your browser won’t support them, take a look at the Traceur compiler, which will back-compile version 6 code to version 5 level.)

Leftovers

  • The Trouble With SEO

    Here’s an example. Let’s say I’m writing an 800 word article about Microsoft — which I’ve been known to do on occasion. Well, to make sure that search engines understand that the article is about Microsoft, I have to name the company, and frequently, within the article. According to SEO experts, I would need to use the word “Microsoft” at least eight times within the article to obtain a keyword density of one percent — just to make sure the search engines understand that this article is indeed about our buddies in Redmond. I’d also need to make sure that the title also contains the word “Microsoft,” as search engines give extra weight to keywords included in the title.

  • No, Rand Paul didn’t ‘storm out’ of an interview

    You’ll notice that both Paul and Lewis agreed to one more question, and Paul left when Lewis asked a second “last question.” But that Paul walked off quickly and that the lights were turned off made it look that he left in the middle of it. Optics!

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Treating Jack Straw Differently

      A UKIP candidate has been obliged to report to the police for breaking the law on “treating” for providing sausage rolls at an event. Yet Jack Straw at elections in 2005 and 2010 held rallies for the Muslim community in Blackburn at which the Labour Party provided hundreds of voters with full sit down meals, free of charge, and Police refused to take any action – indeed they were protecting the event. This is yet another example of the political elite being above the law.

    • In FBI Terrorism Sting Against Mentally Ill Kansas Man, Informants Built Bomb & Provided List of Materials

      In a terrorism sting operation, the FBI arrested a twenty year-old man from Topeka, Kansas, who United States government officials claim attempted to “detonate a vehicle bomb at Fort Riley military base near Manhattan, Kansas.” He also apparently suffers from mental illness.

      John T. Booker Jr., who also goes by the name Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempting to damage property by means of an explosive and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.

      “Thanks to the efforts of the law enforcement community, we were able to safely disrupt this threat to the brave men and women who serve our country,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin declared. “Protecting American lives by identifying and bringing to justice those who wish to harm U.S. citizens remains the National Security Division’s number one priority.”

      But, according to an affidavit [PDF] by an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in Topeka, Booker had no direct interaction or communication with any terrorists or terrorist organizations prior to the FBI targeting him. He had obtained no explosives to carry out any sort of attack. He lacked the resources or capabilities act and told one of the informants in the case that he wanted to join the Islamic State but “didn’t know anyone who could help him do so.”

      An informant (CHS 1) introduced Booker to a second informant (CHS 2), who claimed to be a “high ranking sheik planning terrorist acts in the United States.” CHS 1 provided the list of materials that Booker needed to have in order to build a vehicle bomb. The two informants built the vehicle bomb, not Booker.

    • Army Recruit Charged With Helping ISIS Watched by FBI, Given Clearance by Army

      A Kansas man arrested and charged Friday morning for attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State was under surveillance by the FBI last year when he checked himself into a mental institution and was not regarded as an immediate threat, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

      In fact, the U.S. Army had approved the new recruit for a Secret clearance.

      John T. Booker Jr., who also goes by the name Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, was arrested Friday and charged with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State, plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction, and planning to destroy property with an explosive.

    • Exclusive: U.S. expands intelligence sharing with Saudis in Yemen operation

      The United States is expanding its intelligence-sharing with Saudi Arabia to provide more information about potential targets in the kingdom’s air campaign against Houthi militias in Yemen, U.S. officials told Reuters.

    • Secrecy Shrouds Unknown Role Of Top UK Government Official

      The British government is refusing to disclose the job title and taxpayer-funded salary of one of the most senior law enforcement officials in the United Kingdom, claiming the details have to be kept a secret for security reasons.

      Cressida Dick (pictured above) was formerly one of the highest ranking officers at London’s Metropolitan Police, the largest police force in the U.K., where she headed the Specialist Operations unit and oversaw a controversial criminal investigation into journalists who reported on Edward Snowden’s leaked documents.

    • Trapped in Yemen, Americans File Lawsuit Against US Government

      Despite the ongoing danger to their lives, Awnallah says that his family has received no assistance from the U.S. government. “[My family] has tried to get in touch, but no one is helping them,” he said. “They are asking me all the time if they are going to die here.”

      On April 9, Awnallah’s family and dozens of other Yemeni-Americans filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of American citizens trapped in the country. Citing Executive Order 12656, which obligates “protection or evacuation of U.S. Citizens and nationals abroad” in times of danger, the lawsuit further alleges that the U.S. government’s refusal so far to conduct evacuation operations in Yemen represents the continuation of longstanding policies that effectively deny full citizenship rights to Yemeni-Americans.

    • If Chuck Schumer kills the Iran nuclear deal, he should not be Senate minority leader

      The framework for the Iranian nuclear deal is about as good as anyone could reasonably expect. If it were solely up to the negotiators, it would likely be finalized in June. But they are not the only players, and it’s become clear that the biggest danger to the deal are hawks in Iran and the U.S.

  • Finance

    • Greens throw support behind Tax Dodging Bill

      In the wake of the HSBC, Swiss Leaks and LuxLeaks tax avoidance scandals the Green Party has pledged to introduce a Tax Dodging Bill in the first 100 days after the election. The campaign for such a Bill is being widely supported by a network of NGOs, cooperatives, faith groups, MPs and Unions [1].

    • Big tech companies lack one thing – shame

      Like, do these adults — at least physically, the three are in that stage of life — have no shame? Tony King of Apple, Maile Carnegie of Google, and Bill Sample of Microsoft were not in any way fazed by the fact that the companies they head locally cheat on their taxes.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Media

    • CNN Wants to Believe: White House ‘Russian Hackers’ Go From Suspects to Perps

      Unnamed “investigators”–who may come from the “FBI, Secret Service [or] US intelligence agencies,” we learn earlier in the piece–“believe” there are “tell-tale codes and other markers” that “point to” Russian government employees–how much fuzzier does evidence get? Yet immediately CNN is talking about the “Russian hack” as though it’s proven fact,,,

    • WSJ Ignores Conservative Spending Behind WI’s New Judicial Amendment, Remembers To Blame Soros

      In its analysis of an unprecedented change to how the chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is selected, The Wall Street Journal ignored the significant financial contributions a right-wing group made in support of the move, which would strengthen conservative control of the court before it examines possible illegal campaign coordination between that same group and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R). Instead, the editorial board focused on the fact that the current chief justice has a lawyer who is on the board of directors of a judicial election reform group founded by George Soros.

    • Hillary Clinton Team Holds Off-The-Record Journalist Dinner Ahead Of 2016 Announcement

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign team held an off-the-record dinner Thursday night in Washington, D.C., for roughly two dozen journalists and staff members at John Podesta’s house, according to sources familiar with the matter.

      The dinner signals that the Clinton team is trying to engage with top reporters in the days before the Democrat’s expected announcement of a 2016 presidential run. It also suggests the new campaign team is looking to change course from the toxic relationship with the press that plagued the 2008 race. The Clinton team is also holding a private event in New York on Friday night for journalists, according to sources.

    • Attorney Responds To Times Of Israel Genocide Post: ‘I Didn’t Write That S**t’

      Lawyer and writer Josh Bornstein demanded an explanation from The Times of Israel on Thursday after the site published an op-ed under his name that advocated genocide of Palestinians.

      The post, which sparked outrage across social media and was quickly taken down by the site, called Palestinians “cockroaches” and said that Israel should “exterminate them.”

      The Times of Israel tweeted that it was “looking into” the post and noted that it did not endorse its content. The article ran under Bornstein’s byline, although several people noted that it looked nothing like anything else he had ever published.

      At about 6 p.m.. EDT, Bornstein took to Twitter from his home in Australia to clarify that not only had he not written the “racist” pro-genocide post, but that he had never started an account at the Times in the first place.

      “I didn’t write that shit,” he said. He noted he was a “secular atheist,” contrary to the religious tone of the piece. He later added that he suspected the site was hacked.

      Bornstein said he wanted an explanation from the Times of Israel.

  • Censorship

    • China’s Great Cannon

      On March 16, GreatFire.org observed that servers they had rented to make blocked websites accessible in China were being targeted by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. On March 26, two GitHub pages run by GreatFire.org also came under the same type of attack. Both attacks appear targeted at services designed to circumvent Chinese censorship. A report released by GreatFire.org fingered malicious Javascript returned by Baidu servers as the source of the attack. Baidu denied that their servers were compromised.

  • Privacy

    • Git Success Stories and Tips from Tor Chief Architect Nick Mathewson

      Tor, the free and open source software for anonymous web communications, has been using the Git revision control system for more than six years. The tool is so ingrained in the project’s development that Director and Chief Architect Nick Mathewson’s daily work flow is built around Git, he says.

      “Git’s the eighth version control system I’ve had to use, and the first one I’ve seriously trusted,” Mathewson said. “Many thanks to the Git developers for all their hard work.”

    • Privacy International calls on Europe’s top human rights court to rule on British mass surveillance

      Privacy International and several other human rights organisations are taking the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights over its mass surveillance practices, after a judgement last year found that collecting all internet traffic flowing in and out of the UK and bulk intelligence sharing with the United States was legal.

      The appeal, filed last week by Privacy International, Bytes for All, Amnesty International, Liberty, and other partners, comes in response to a ruling in December by the UK’s surveillance court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, dealing with the industrial-scale spying programmes TEMPORA and PRISM revealed by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

    • Our SecureDrop System for Leaks Now Uses HTTPS

      We’re happy to announce that sources can now access our SecureDrop document-submission website using HTTPS. Although SecureDrop connections were already encrypted previously, our new setup provides leakers with additional assurance that they are connecting with the authentic Intercept SecureDrop and not an impostor.

    • A Guide to the 5+ Known Intelligence Community Telecommunications Metadata Dragnets

      I’ve been laying this explanation out since USA Today provided new details on DEA’s International Dragnet, but it’s clear it needs to be done in more systematic fashion, because really smart people continue to mistakenly treat the Section 215 database as the analogue to the DEA dragnet described by USAT, which it’s not. There are at least five known telecommunications dragnets (some of which appear to integrate other kinds of metadata, especially Internet metadata).

  • Civil Rights

    • Montreal professors stare down riot cops

      It’s been a tough week for the student movement in Quebec. A fractious congress that resulted in the resignation and firing of the entire executive of the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante, the largest student federation in the province, led into a week where schools already on strike have struggled to win votes to maintain that strike, and few if any new schools have joined them. Facing a growing consensus that the strike should be postponed until the fall in order to join public sector unions in a common front, striking students are vulnerable.

    • Greenpeace bank accounts frozen by Indian government

      The Indian government has frozen bank accounts of Greenpeace after accusing the international environment campaign group of encouraging “anti-development” protests in the emerging economic power.

      The Union Home Ministry on Thursday suspended the official registration for foreign funding of Greenpeace India for six months and froze seven bank accounts connected with the organisation, The Hindu, a local newspaper, reported.

      Samit Aich, the executive director of Greenpeace, said the move was “an attack on democracy”.

    • Middle school student charged with cybercrime in Holiday

      The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office has charged Domanik Green, an eighth-grader at Paul R. Smith Middle School, with an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access, a felony. Sheriff Chris Nocco said Thursday that Green logged onto the school’s network on March 31 using an administrative-level password without permission. He then changed the background image on a teacher’s computer to one showing two men kissing.

    • New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Signs Civil Forfeiture Abolition Bill

      A quick and happy update from New Mexico: Gov. Susana Martinez (R) has signed HB 560, which I detailed here, into law. New Mexico has thus effectively abolished civil asset forfeiture by requiring a criminal conviction before the government can seize property.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts