09.20.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Security at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Kevin
Summary: Humour used to avoid answering a serious question about whether the NSA asked for a Linux backdoor
LINUX is the most widely used operating system kernel and its annual event which we wrote about earlier today, both positively and critically, had one interesting nugget of information [1]. Torvalds responded with a joke and an ambiguity to a serious question about an important matter. Torvalds and his Linux Foundation colleagues who sign off kernels on an almost weekly basis [2] owe a more serious response to people who put Linux in governments and large enterprises (most of them outside the United States). Humour has its place, but when millions of people die due to imperialism that relies on global surveillance, then some seriousness is required. Having read some dubious text about the NSA’s SELinux and some real attempts to plant back doors in all sorts of operating systems and even a CMS like WordPress (some attempts were successful and catastrophic), I think that we deserve a serious, unambiguous answer.
“Torvalds responded with a joke and an ambiguity to a serious question about an important matter.”As a token or a relevant reminder of what the NSA does and how it does it I am appending some of the latest news bits about the NSA and about privacy in general. It turns out that complicity from developers and corporations — not necessarily hacking or cracking — is what enables to NSA to access almost every bit of information around the world, even financial transactions outside the United States. Wikileaks (i.e. journalism with an edge) was almost silenced using illegal financial embargoes that got overturned only years later (after a court battle). Worth noting, as iophk put it, is the war on journalism which we saw here in the UK last month (David Miranda). It is a classic “war on journalism,” he explained, noting that “Slashdot is now part of that by providing a platform for those that want to require reporters to rat on sources. The part about the 5th amendment is just a distraction from steamrolling over protection of confidentiality of sources in journalism.”
“Note the strawman about raping,” he said. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Torvalds responds to a question about whether the U.S. government asked him to put a backdoor in Linux, and explains why he’s a developer and how others can be.
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Torvalds responded “no” while nodding his head “yes,” as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman also announced today, September 14, that the twelfth maintenance release for the 3.10 LTS branch of the Linux kernel is now available for download.
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The United States’ NSA intelligence agency is interested in international payments processed by companies including Visa, SPIEGEL has learned. It has even set up its own financial database to track money flows through a “tailored access operations” division.
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The NSA has been widely monitoring international banking and credit card transactions, a new report says referencing Edward Snowden’s leak. The agency targeted Visa customers and global financial service SWIFT and created its own money flows database.
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The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.
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It accidentally published the real name of one of its young models, who had been working as Ancilla Tilia. Her mother, who shared her real surname, started getting some uncomfortable calls.
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The Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) has repeatedly broken the laws and pushed legal boundaries in its surveillance operations, according to revelations by the Swedish media on Monday.
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Newly released documents reveal how the government uses border crossings to seize and examine travelers’ electronic devices instead of obtaining a search warrant to gain access to the data.
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In the UK mobile Internet providers are required to block content that may be considered “harmful” to children. The filter mainly targets adult oriented content, but one provider now says that VPN services also fall into this category as they allow kids to bypass age restrictions. Down Under a similar filtering proposal is making headlines today, but after a policy backflip it appears that Australia may escape a mandatory Internet filter for now.
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INTERNET RIGHTS GROUP the Electronic Frontier Foundation has won a legal victory that will force the release of hundreds of NSA surveillance related documents that date back at least nine years.
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Intelligence-gathering agency has created working groups to access contacts lists, SMS, and user location on the three most popular mobile platforms, according to classified documents viewed by Spiegel.
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The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics.
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Top-secret documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA introduced weaknesses into computer security standards adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, putting at risk NIST’s reputation as a disinterested purveyor of cyber guidelines.
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I’ve heard a rumour that that nice man Mr Blair is similarly in love. Apparently, he thinks that my fingers are so pretty that he just has to have little pictures of all ten fingertips. I’d better get my nails done so that they look good – I wouldn’t want to let him down.
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A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down. I fear for academic freedom.
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It was only a matter of time before we learned that the NSA has managed to thwart much of the encryption that protects telephone and online communication, but new revelations show the extent to which the agency, and Britain’s GCHQ, have gone to systematically undermine encryption.
Without the ability to actually crack the strongest algorithms that protect data, the intelligence agencies have systematically worked to thwart or bypass encryption using a variety of underhanded methods, according to revelations published by the New York Times and Guardian newspapers and the journalism non-profit ProPublica, based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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$250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
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“It is this culture of surveillance and monitoring that is seeping into their lives offline – and making girls feel that it is perfectly acceptable for boys to demand to know their location and what they are doing at all times.”
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Starting around August 20, we started to see a sudden spike in the number of Tor clients. By now it’s unmistakable: there are millions of new Tor clients and the numbers continue to rise…
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Today’s post covers Tor hidden services and their anonymity. In the first few paragraphs I will provide some basic, high level information on the Tor network and then talk about a way to uncover the real location of some anonymous hidden services.
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PRISM and other recent revelations put a touch of gray in Chrome’s silver lining.
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The US Drug Enforcement Administration has enlisted telecom giant AT&T to develop a massive telephone records database that may put the National Security Agency’s domestic phone surveillance to shame.
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The latest published leak from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lays bare classified details of the US government’s $52.6 billion (£33.9 billion) intelligence budget, and makes the first reference in any of the Snowden documents to a “groundbreaking” US encryption-breaking effort targeted squarely at internet traffic.
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PRIVACY HATER Facebook has released its latest raft of changes to its terms and conditions, including a small update to the way the firm makes use of its facial recognition technologies to increase the accuracy of photo-tagging.
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Facebook is slurping mobile phone numbers from its users without explaining why, it has emerged.
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The Washington Post reports that the NSA paid $278 million this fiscal year to tap into phone lines, e-mail and instant messages
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The GCHQ listening post on Mount Troodos in Cyprus is arguably the most valued asset which the UK contributes to UK/US intelligence cooperation. The communications intercept agencies, GCHQ in the UK and NSA in the US, share all their intelligence reports (as do the CIA and MI6). Troodos is valued enormously by the NSA. It monitors all radio, satellite and microwave traffic across the Middle East, ranging from Egypt and Eastern Libya right through to the Caucasus. Even almost all landline telephone communication in this region is routed through microwave links at some stage, picked up on Troodos.
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Finally the videos from the whistleblower track at the August international geekfest OHM 2013 in the Netherlands are beginning to emerge. Here’s one of the key sessions, the Great Spook Panel, with ex-CIA Ray McGovern, ex-FBI Coleen Rowley, ex-NSA Tom Drake, ex-Department of Justice Jesselyn Radack, and myself.
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President Barack Obama sought Wednesday to reassure Europeans outraged over U.S. surveillance programs that his government isn’t sifting through their emails or eavesdropping on their telephone calls. He acknowledged that the programs haven’t always worked as intended, saying “we had to tighten them up.”
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The NSA has huge capabilities – and if it wants in to your computer, it’s in. With that in mind, here are five ways to stay safe
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The latest revelations from the Guardian give good evidence of why they have recently been the target of government harassment, and also why this is entirely unjustified.
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If an Android device (phone or tablet) has ever logged on to a particular Wi-Fi network, then Google probably knows the Wi-Fi password. Considering how many Android devices there are, it is likely that Google can access most Wi-Fi passwords worldwide.
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The Resolution calls on member states to regulate and effectively oversee the secret services and special procedures and to pass legislative provisions at the national level to protect whistleblowers. The resolution also calls upon the Secretary General to launch an inquiry under Article 52 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
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In the previous article we set up Tor and was able to successfully use it to browse the web securely. Now we’ll take it a step further and become part of the Tor browsing network. As being an exit node holds a bit more power we’ll take it a step back and be a relay node. This means that traffic will flow in and out of our network, but no one can see it coming from us or somewhere else. Tor also states that this can provide better anonymity than just running it as a client.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 10:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Christopher Columbus did not “discover” America, he invaded it
Summary: GNU is being removed from the timeline of the GNU/Linux operating system, owing not just to ignorance but also wilful omission
Linuxcon took place some while ago, giving many corporations an opportunity to spread some shameless self-serving marketing messages. This in itself is not a big issue. Corporations exist to maximise profit and they need to market themselves, sometimes selfishly. It’s when deception and false marketing are encountered that we should speak out.
Sadly, the host of Linuxcon is actually one of the biggest liars. It is not a new lie though and this accusation of ours depends on the definition of “lie”. To quote Wikipedia: “When the GNU project first started they “had an Emacs text editor with Lisp for writing editor commands, a source level debugger, a yacc-compatible parser generator, and a linker”.[3] The GNU system required its own C compiler and tools to be free software, so that these also had to be developed. By June 1987 the project had accumulated and developed free software for an assembler, an almost finished portable optimizing C compiler (GCC), an editor (GNU Emacs), and various Unix utilities (such as ls, grep, awk, make and ld).[4] They had an initial kernel that needed more updates.”
“Without the GPL, it’s unlikely that many people would have gotten involved in this kernel’s development. Linux needed GNU.”The word “Linux” is commonly used to refer to a system created 30 years ago by Richard Stallman. It was called GNU. The Linux Foundation knows this, but it exploits a misunderstanding or a confusion to remove GNU out of history and pretend Linus Torvalds started it all. This is not an accidental error and in a way they can justify themselves and insist that have said the truth. It’s a bit like a lie by omission [1]. This lie tends to perpetuate through misinformed people, owing its strength (and people’s irrational adherence to it) to inertia.
There are some jokes about Linux version numbers and Windows [2-3] (not so amusing), with some Cult of Personalities coverage revolving around Linus Torvalds [4-5], who again entertains the questions about Microsoft. Apart from that, there is some interesting bunch of numbers about Linux development [6,7], but again, developers of non-kernel parts get mostly ignored, despite the de facto definition of “Linux” being more than just this undoubtedly powerful kernel.
Having had many opportunities to speak with Stallman as of late I can truly relate to his concern about omission of GNU and Free software as a whole. It’s almost as though his life’s work (personal sacrifice) got abducted and the symptoms are everywhere we look. Be sure to remind the Linux Foundation of GNU; without GCC (GNU), there would have been no runnable Linux. Without the GPL, it’s unlikely that many people would have gotten involved in this kernel’s development. Linux needed GNU.
GNU will soon turn 30 years old and we are planning to publish special Stallman interviews to mark this important anniversary. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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One of the greatest impacts Linux is having on the technology industry is in the way it’s built. We often tout Linux’s success stories – from running Facebook, Amazon and Google to powering eight out of 10 financial trades to running the world’s supercomputers and mobile devices, and more. But these successes are the results of a massive collaborative development effort that is 22 years in the making and today is being studied and leveraged by everyone from software developers to business executives in industries ranging from networking to financial services to life science and more.
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Linux 3.12 gets ‘Suicidal Squirrel’ moniker as Linux Lord recovers from SSD FAIL
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A few minutes ago, September 14, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced that the first maintenance release for the 3.11 LTS branch of the Linux kernel is now available for download.
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Today in Open Source: A broken SSD halts Linux changes. Plus: LinuxQuestions.org milestones, and see startup services in Linuxs
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In a free-wheeling Q&A session Linus Torvalds and other top Linux programmers, talked about Linux, scuba-diving, and other odds and ends of the developer life.
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Both the pace of development and the volume of code continue to grow in the open-source Linux kernel.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 10:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: If every war is ignited and sustained using lies, then we must tackle the lies to prevent and/or end wars
VIOLENCE is not exceptionally popular only in the fantasy world manufactured and glorified by Hollywood; a lot of it gets embedded in US culture by introducing children to guns (mostly toy guns) at a very young age. It is hardly surprising that excessive use of force and police brutality in US police forces are easier to find than in many other Western countries (see new examples like [1-2]). In a culture of plutocrats-driven outsourcing there is little left to produce and actually export from the US other than patents (one-sided treaties) and arms. US planes are merely assembled in the US and actually made in China for the most part. Even the debris of the World Trade Centre got shipped to China for material reuse. Speaking of the World Trade Centre, let’s recall the 9/11 events from 40 years ago [3,4]. The CIA took down democracy and helps dethrone a legitimate government, killing many people in the process. If this is what “helping (or spreading) democracy” is all about, Syria has much to fear. Given the CIA’s interest not in national security but in all sorts of turf wars (like the Drug War [5], usually for corporate interests) it is clear that we must look past the BBC’s constant propaganda (e.g. demonisation by proxy/association [6]) and recall who benefits from war in Syria. Iraq gives us many answers because there’s a bit of a rerun here, even if the parallels are limited and the narration varies. There are disputes over who caused the chemical weapons incident [7,8] and it’s a bit similar to/reminiscent of the “weapons of mass destruction” pretext (joined by rhetoric and bogus association between Saddam Hussein and 9/11). Last year in daily links I have shown few articles about CIA support for so-called ‘rebels’ in Syria (there are still reports on this [9]). Some of the articles about this evidently got deleted from news sites (people speculate over why this happened) and earlier this year many more reports about this appeared, some based on leaks from CIA agents who quietly occupied a US Consulate in Libya — a so-called ‘consulate’ from which weapons got funnelled into ‘rebel’ hands in Syria. Months ago there were reports saying that the US would try to invade Syria in August; these were mostly correct, except the international community put too much of a veto power that even war-mongering ‘democrat’ and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barrack Hussein Obama could not ignore and do what he truly wanted (war!). Don’t let Mr. Obama fool you on chemical weapons; he would be a hypocrite to do so as no nation ever used chemical weapons as viciously as the US did, not to mention the US’ support for other countries use of chemical weapons when it suited US agenda [10,11]. Contempt for democracy is when one ignores one’s own voters’ appeals against war and contempt for peace is choice of war when peaceful resolutions are on the table.
The Iraq War Logs from Wikileaks, as well as a lot of other work from Wikileaks, has helped many US citizen improve their familiarity with the US war machine, the CIA, and the secret surveillance entities that Hammond and Snowden exposed even further. Wikileaks relied on cryptology and privacy for secure existence that the US tried to monopolise [12] and it’s no wonder that Obama is now fighting leaks like never before [13], even if the leaks are intended to expose crimes (hence the leaks are not crimes themselves). Regarding Syria invasion, the leader of the British Pirate Party correctly said [14]: “We have no legal or international credibility.”
“We need to take charge of the Internet, the computer code in widespread use, and thus — ultimately — encourage open and free communication.”This is true, especially after the Iraq invasion and occupation that never ended.
This should be noted along with the claim that the bloodbath in Syria is currently driven, at least partially, by world powers that view Syria as somewhat of a proxy war where Syrian citizens are mere pawns or collateral damage. Osama Bin Laden, the celebrity terrorist which Obama wants us to be so utterly terrified of, once served the CIA by attacking the Soviets far from his home country, which happens to be a strong US ally (many 9/11 attackers came from there also). Need it be mentioned that US imperialism — not purely the principles of Islam — motivated his attacks on the US? He viewed US based in Saudi Arabia as violation of sovereignty and judging by illegal (and secret) drone strikes from flying robots stationed in Saudi Arabia, the CIA hardly wants to end terror but rather to fuel it with more “blowback” and more hatred towards the West. Who benefits? The CIA. Just look at its growing black budget [15]. There is always enough money for more wars, but never for health, education, etc.
The bottom line is, we need to support leaks, whistleblowers, and generally truth-telling if we are ever to stop the war machine that justifies wars using lies and kills people for private monetary gain. Privacy is clearly a necessity and a majority of the secret branches of government, including the NSA, certainly wants to put an end to privacy. They crave total control. Privacy necessitates software freedom and therein lies the relevance to our causes. Free software is important. It’s “Linux vs. Bullshit”, to quote a new headline from Linux Journal [16]. With secret code we will never know what’s true. We need to take charge of the Internet, the computer code in widespread use, and thus — ultimately — encourage open and free communication. A society that cannot communicate securely is an oppressed society and someone (the oppressor) will continue to covertly control it, assassinating some messengers if profiling requires it and intimidating others who challenge “necessary” lies. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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A 107-year-old Arkansas man was shot and killed by SWAT officers after allegedly provoking a shootout on Saturday night, according to police.
The Pine Bluff Police Department got a call about an aggravated assault at a home early on Saturday evening, according to Pine Bluff Lt. David Price.
When officers arrived, they were told by two people at the residence that Monroe Isadore, 107, had threatened them with a gun, Price said.
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A Texas officer has been caught on camera beating up several members of a family. According to KHOU.com, Harris County Deputy Jimmy Drummond followed the son home for allegedly speeding, then attacked members of his family when they approached him. The altercation was recorded on a dash cam.
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I am able to tell the story of the Chilean coup of Sept. 11, 1973
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How the drama and repression developed as a US-backed coup overthrew Allende’s government on 11 September 1973
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Narco-Trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero Knows Where All the Skeletons Are Buried in the US’ Dirty Drug War
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The intelligence gathered against Syria’s Assad was manufactured by elements within the spy community in order to mislead the US President to take punitive action, Ray McGovern, a veteran CIA analyst, told RT.
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The Obama Administration’s intelligence report on Syria was a rehash of Iraq. “There are lots of things that aren’t spelled out” in the four-page document, according to Richard Guthrie, the former project head of the Chemical and Biological Warfare Project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. One piece of evidence is the alleged interception of Syrian government communications, but no transcripts were provided.
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Rami Abdul-Rahman, the head of the Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based pro-opposition NGO, said that 1,500 fighters of the al-Qaeda linked Al-Nusra Front and the Qalamon Liberation Front stormed the village after fierce fighting with the regular Syrian army on Sunday. Last Wednesday the Islamists had attacked Maaloula for the first time but were driven out by the Syrian army after it received reinforcements from the capital Damascus.
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How can the US proclamation that it intends to intervene militarily in Syria to protect civilians from chemical warfare be taken seriously, when the US has slaughtered and poisoned hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons itself, in Vietnam, Iraq and elsewhere?
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As of this writing, America is planning military action against Syria under the pretext that the Syrian government allegedly used chemical weapons in an attack in a Damascus suburb on August 21. Leading figures in the Obama administration can be heard referring to chemical weapons as a “moral obscenity,” such that the United States has a “moral obligation” to punish the country that uses them.
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I was in Germany for Chaos Congress 2009, a hacker conference, and after attending a series of talks I was headed back to my hotel when I spotted Julian Assange. This predated my working as a project manager at DARPA as a hacker-in-residence, if you will. It was also before Wikileaks released the video “Collateral Murder” and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, the Swedish rape allegations, and Julian ending up a virtual prisoner, holed up in Ecuador’s diplomatic mission in London.
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Every president who wants to launch another war can’t abide whistleblowers. They might interfere with the careful omissions, distortions and outright lies of war propaganda, which requires that truth be held in a kind of preventative detention.
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We have no moral authority. We have no legal or international credibility.
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Linux doesn’t lie, any more than gravity lies, or geology lies, or atmosphere lies.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 9:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Because copyright, unlike privacy for example, is not a natural right
Photo by T. M. Eckrich
Summary: Freedom and privacy continue to be compromised by the collective monopoly (or oligopoly) of copyright holders
THE TOO-BIG-TO-JAIL cartel, the one which is sometimes called the “copyright monopoly” (Rickard Falkvinge calls it that), is clearly above the law. It overrides and overwrites our laws. To name some of its latest mischiefs, which iophk made us aware of, it is now using collective accountability [1] for intimidation and harassment. Its propaganda efforts are further boosted by UCSF [2] and surveillance is now being used as a tool to protect the monopoly [3,4]. Privacy laws are almost being discarded in the UK [5-7] in order to accommodate this out-of-control monopoly, journalists are being threatened if they don’t stick to the monopoly’s party line [8], and lawsuits are being used to discourage acts of legitimate sharing [9] as long as the monopoly can claim that some proportion of the material is copyrighted (the monopoly is sometimes found to be responsible for planting such material as bait).
Techrights rarely delves into the field of copyright, but it is likely to do more of this in the future. Now more than ever before these matters are become closely intertwined with privacy and by extension with software freedom. Proprietary software helps the copyright monopoly not just by facilitating DRM but also by reporting on (ratting out) users. To fight the many injustices of the copyright cartel we need to encourage people to adopt Free software. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Back in May, police acting on behalf of the Federation Against Copyright Theft sent several police cars to arrest a single alleged movie cammer. But despite allocating significant resources, police have now dropped the charges. However, matters have actually taken a turn for the worse, with the police re-arresting the alleged cammer plus his brother and sister while investigating the online leak of another movie.
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…university falsely claims that using BitTorrent is considered a crime.
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Last month TorrentFreak took a look at the information being held on users by the operators of private BitTorrent trackers. We questioned whether it was time to take another look at the way that data is being handled in order to better protect site members. In our second article on the issue we look not only at the data stored by individual trackers, but also claims that the information is being shared with dozens of other sites.
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There must be an election coming: the Prime Minister is listening to the demands of the music industry for new clampdowns on file sharing
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Remember the Digital Economy Act? Surely one of the worst pieces of UK legislation passed – or rather, rammed through – in recent years, as readers may recall. This was inspired (if that’s the right word) by the French Hadopi scheme brought in by Nicolas Sarkozy, whereby people were threatened with being disconnected from the Internet if they were accused of unauthorised sharing of digital files.
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This week journalists faced an attack on their right to report following their publication of an article on piracy. The piece, an interview with the operator of an unauthorized ebook site, angered publishers when the reporters named the site in question. The editors of two publications were subsequently hit with a criminal complaint in which they were accused of assisting copyright infringement. Meanwhile the operator of the site informs TorrentFreak that they intend to go international.
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The MPAA has scored an important victory against the file-hosting service Hotfile. The District Court of Florida entered a summary judgment against Hotfile noting that the cyberlocker failed to control the distribution of pirated movies through its service. The MPAA applauds the verdict and says it shows that Hotfile’s business model was built on “mass distribution of stolen content.”
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Posted in Europe at 9:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: More evil acts from Verizon have become impossible to hide; Neelie Kroes is seemingly lobbied in secret to help telecoms like Verizon
WE are increasingly being warned by very clever people that the US government (which practically means US-based mega-corporations) has taken over the Internet [1], which translates to ever-eroding rights on the Web, including the right to anonymity [2]. These are unprecedented attacks on civil liberties — moves which ban what was legal in the analogue/physical world. Thanks to the villains from Verizon [3-5], network neutrality is rapidly going away (network neutrality helps avoid a form of ‘soft’ censorship). Verizon is a very malicious company which helps spy on innocent citizens all over the world, including US citizens [6]. It didn’t even put up a fight to prevent this. Remember these factors and facts, internalising them a reason to boycott Verizon. Don’t forget what Verizon did with Microsoft, either.
“Verizon is a very malicious company which helps spy on innocent citizens all over the world, including US citizens.”We in Europe are suffering from the disturbing trend of politics in the US (corporate-driven policies). The Web is being abducted away from the people and turned into a surveillance device against them; hardly anything good is emerging on the Web these days, except more surveillance like ‘cloud’ (‘free’ storage), Google tracking (‘free’ tools), Microsoft’s warrantless eavesdropping (‘free’ calls), and Facebook (volunteer/crowdsource-type informants resource). It’s not amusing and those who don’t yet grasp the impact on society one day will.
While the European authorities are bickering and fighting over costs (not policies), as revealed earlier this month [7-8] amid PR from Neelie Kroes [9], the Web in Europe becomes more censorship-leaning [12] and privatised entities for managing the Net find new ways to make more money, even here in the UK [13]. Neelie Kroes ought to explain herself or retract some of her words and actions. Why she’s doing this is beyond many; some think she has been bamboozled by mega-corporations through lobbyists. If that is the case, she ought to reverse course immediately; what she is doing right now severely discredits the European Commission. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the internet – and now we have to fix it
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Americans can be very divided about technology—Apple versus Google versus Microsoft, cloud versus local, and the list goes on. But it turns out we mostly agree on one thing: There’s no such thing as Internet anonymity.
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In December 2010, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the Open Internet Order, enshrining the concept of “network neutrality”—that Internet Service Providers must treat all data on the Internet equally—into law.
Although wireless broadband was exempt from many of its restrictions, the FCC’s net neutrality law says that fixed broadband providers “may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices” or practice “unreasonable discrimination” that slows content down or degrades its quality. They also must disclose information about their network management practices.
ISPs don’t like this, naturally, but Verizon has objected most strenuously of all. The company sued to halt the Open Internet Order, and after a couple of years’ worth of legal filings, the case is now set to be decided by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
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The carrier wants to charge websites for carrying their packets, but if they win it’d be the end of the Internet as we know it
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It’s difficult to predict how an appeals court will rule after it hears arguments Monday in Verizon Communication’s challenge of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality rules.
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This is hardly a surprise. We’d already pointed out that, while the internet companies had been very vocal about the NSA surveillance efforts, there had been a deafening silence from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. In fact, it later came out that the telcos actually volunteered to share this information, and when the tech companies reached out to get them to sign onto a letter asking the government to be more transparent, AT&T and Verizon refused to sign on.
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The European Commission will push ahead with totally eradicating mobile roaming fees and has already drawn up a piece of draft legislation, according to a leaked document.
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EU commission legislation would introduce flat rate call charges, but big network providers say changes could cost them €7bn
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware at 8:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Source: Official GDC
Summary: The long-ridiculed claims that GNU/Linux has reached its year of desktop prominence are becoming mainstream
Valve is shifting away from Windows and will soon reveal its GNU/Linux appliance [1-10], which will be a gaming machine. Intel, the largest chipmaker, is meanwhile showing increasing levels of support for GNU/Linux leaders [11] (except Canonical’s forks with Ubuntu [12]) in order to sell chips on devices [13-14], desktops/laptops [15], and servers [16]. There is clearly a lot of work going into kernel-level improvements [17-20] and Intel now foresees a future of GNU/Linux as the dominant desktop platform [21-22]. Given that even allies of Microsoft (or former staff-turned-entrepreneur with net worth of $ 1.1 billion) switch to GNU/Linux so enthusiastically, can anyone still say with a straight face that GNU/Linux will never “make it”? █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Valve are making another Linux push towards having their full library available on Linux, this time it’s Half-Life: Source & Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.
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Running With Scissors has revealed some but not all of the details of what will come with the Postal 2 (Steam, Desura) DLC!
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Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve declared that proprietary software and closed platforms are gaming’s past, its future is open and on Linux.
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For those that didn’t yet watch Gabe Newell’s talk about Linux gaming, at the end of the presentation he notes next week will be more information from Valve about their plans to bring Linux into the living room.
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Valve chief blasts PC market, promises big news is coming next week.
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Gabe Newell was one of the prominent speakers today during the first day of LinuxCon in New Orleans. Here’s an upload of his presentation where he’s trumpeting the benefits of Linux for servers and gaming. Gabe believes, “Linux is the future of gaming.”
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Linux is landing on gaming systems and embedded devices, but challenges still remain as leading technology thinkers detail the state of Linux at the LinuxCon conference.
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The gamers among us waited… very… patiently… for Steam to come to Linux. This week, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell came to LinuxCon to talk about Linux, gaming, and how important open source is to the future of gaming, which given the audience, he described as “sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the Pope.” In even better news, he also strongly hinted at a Steam Box announcement next week.
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Open Source is all about collaboration and contribution and two leading communities are working towards making Wayland a reality.
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As a major set-back to Canonical’s plans for Mir, Intell has pulled the carpet from underneath Canonical by announcing that they won’t support XMir.
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EMAC announced a fanless, Linux-ready PC/104 format single-board computer built around Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, available in a wide temperature (-40 to 80°C) model.
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Acrosser announced a Fedora Linux-ready Mini-ITX single board computer (SBC) equipped with a dual-core 1.86GHz Intel Atom D2550. The AMB-D255T3 supports up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, can run dual displays via VGA, HDMI, or 18-bit LVDS interfaces, and offers both PCI and Mini-PCIe expansion.
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Intel and Google have announced new Chromebooks powered by the much talked about Haswell processors. Two major PC vendors ASUS and Toshiba have joined the Chrome OS club which include Samsung, Acer and HP. While HP and Acer are offering new Chromebooks, ASUS is brining new Chromebox to the market.
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At LinuxCon, Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s chief Linux and open-source technologist, explains why Intel is invested in open source and what his company is doing with the OpenStack cloud.
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It’s been a while since last hearing anything from Intel engineers about their proposed Power Capping Framework or Running Average Power Limit driver for the Linux kernel, but that changed today. New patches have been released for the power monitoring and limiting kernel code.
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Last week I ran a System76 Galago UltraPro Preview with some benchmark results and a special article looking at the Intel Iris Pro 5200, the Haswell graphics cores with 128MB of dedicated video memory stacked onto the die itself. Those tests were done remotely but now with having a System76 Galago UltraPro ultrabook review sample in the labs, here are some fresh tests looking at the very latest state of Haswell Iris Pro graphics under Linux. The benchmarks cover the state of Ubuntu 13.04 going through the latest open-source Linux graphics driver code with the yet-to-be-released Mesa 9.3 and the Linux 3.12 kernel.
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For the past few days at Phoronix we have begun looking extensively at the Intel Iris Pro 5200 graphics under Linux, since receiving the System76 Galago UltraPro. The Iris Pro 5200 are the new high-end Intel Haswell graphics that have 128MB of embedded video RAM on the die, which should yield a nice performance boost when properly implemented within the Intel Linux driver. Already our testing has found the Iris Pro performance on Linux has doubled with open-source driver improvements since Haswell’s launch. Now we’re out today with our first Intel Iris Pro OpenGL gaming benchmarks between Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8 for this Intel Core i7 Ultrabook.
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Intel’s Ian Romanick will take to the Linux Plumbers Conference tomorrow with a plea to work together to provide better capabilities across the Linux stack for better debugging and profiling of graphics applications/systems on Linux. The open-source Intel Linux Mesa developer himself calls the current graphics debugging situation on Linux a “disaster” to be fixed.
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Today in Open Source: Intel thinks the year of the Linux desktop is here. Plus: Linus and Moore’s Law, and Tiny Core 5.0 screenshots
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New Orleans: The Sept. 18 LinuxCon keynote sessions were kicked off by Intel Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist and Linux kernel developer Dirk Hohndel who said that client computing today is mostly Linux. Thanks to Android on smartphones and tablets, plus the rise of Chromebooks, Intel sees Linux as the leading end-user operating system.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, GPL at 7:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
False red flags
Summary: Black Duck mentioned in the context of an Initial Public Offering (IPO) as FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) becomes somewhat of an industry standard
Some ‘former’ Microsoft employees saw potential in FOSS FUD and went on to initiate companies that monetise this. One such company is Black Duck and “someone pushing Black Duck,” iophk says, showing an article that speaks of IPO [1] for this firm.
Black Duck’s main product seems to be proprietary software (with software patents on it) that allegedly helps find GPL violations in proprietary software developed in proprietary software companies. Some FOSS, eh? Surely a friend of FOSS, no? Or just a fiend rather.
In other news that iophk shared with us, the GPL is being upheld again [2], making the world of software a freer place. As FOSS becomes more prevalent in this world we shall vigilantly track those who try to stand in its way. The most widely used/sold platform, namely Android, is showing how dominant FOSS has become so quickly.
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The District Court of Hamburg, Germany, recently had the opportunity to review the conditions governing the use of Open Source software. In a decision that bolsters the enforceability of open source software licenses, the district court confirmed that the defendant had lost its right to use the software licensed under the General Public License (GPLv2) when it failed to fully reveal the underlying source code. The court rejected the defense argument that requiring the defendant company to comply with the conditions of the GPLv2 was unreasonable (decision of 14. June 2013, file no. 308 O 10/13, available in German here).
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Posted in IBM at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Big Blue marketing binge
Summary: IBM’s boosting of patents (and infamous policy — plus aggressive lobbying — for software patents) conflicts with its pledge to GNU/Linux
IN a Linux-centric event this month a lot of companies try to portray themselves as the BFF of Linux. Links [1-3] below are the IBM flavour of marketing, throwing bogus numbers around for marketing purposes (like the “R&D” type marketing). They know why they’re doing this. They’re trying to appeal to geeks.
To put things in perspective, IBM has a complex relationship with GNU/Linux because it is also a bit of a Microsoft partner (on the patents and software side). The Open Invention Network, as this new article about “bad software patents” shows, continues to blur the gap between real patent reform (abolishing software patents) and corporate reform which gets painted as “pro-Linux”. Jon Brodkin is saying in the summary of his article that OIN, which gets called “Linux defenders” and is prominently backed by IBM (its founder is from IBM), will:
…attack bad software patents before they’re approved
How about just attacking all software patents, banning their approval? No, IBM would not want that. Along with Microsoft IBM has been lobbying around the world for software patents. So be careful not to confuse IBM with a Linux BFF. IBM is a confusing, giant squid and its commitment to GNU/Linux is only possible when we compartmentalise this company. As a side note, and as pointed out on numerous occasions in July and August, IBM is back to its notorious practices which resemble how it was helping the Nazis “barcode” people for detention and extermination; IBM has been fighting very hard (publicly even) for a giant CIA contract. Yes, that’s the CIA whose heads tell us they want to grab copies of all data and hang on to it forever (joined to the NSA by the hip). There are many other reasons to be cautious and sceptical of IBM; some of these reasons were covered here before. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Rising open source tide carries all boats, IBM hopes
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Linux is a thoroughbred in the world of computing and as sure a thing as you can get. With a community of tens of thousands of developers from more than 200 companies supporting the Linux operating system, it is constantly being updated with changes that are shared across a wide variety of industries and with users in diverse environments.
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