08.12.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“The Matriculation Examination Board of Finland has just opened an international hacking contest to find flaws and exploits in Digabi Live — the Live Debian based operating system to be used in the all-digital final exams by the year 2016. The contest ends on 1st of September, and the winners are about to scoop hefty hardware prizes, also available as cash.”
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What prompted me to write this article were two things. One, the recent donation drive on Tuxmachines. Two, the announcement about the closing of The H, which you may also have known as The H: Open Source, Security and Development. What is common for both these announcement is the obvious difficulty in having a sustainable financial model when running sites dealing in Linux.
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I write about GNU/Linux for a living. It always frustrates me when I make a mistake that makes it through my review process to the actual published article. Most often, it is a spelling error that I missed during my proofreading process. I recently decided that I had to find a systematic method of identifying errors BEFORE publishing my articles.
Quality assurance is the most important aspect of any endeavor, whether its is building safety systems into a state-of-the-art hybrid vehicle at Toyota, or writing articles that present accurate information about the GNU/Linux operating system.
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Once in a while, a prominent or not so prominent member of the Linux community makes a switch – for one reason or the other – to another operating system, usually to Mac OS X. The latest is Denis Koryavov, the former GUI Development lead for ROSA Laboratory, a Linux software solutions provider based in Russia and the publisher of ROSA Linux.
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Desktop
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The battle for Freedom continues in Uruguay, a country of more than 3 million in South America. You can see in this chart that every up-tick in adoption corresponds to a down-tick in M$’s OS. This is the only game in town on legacy PCs. GNU/Linux is slowly but surely winning share.
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Kernel Space
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A while ago, I read Ken Stark’s delicious rant because of a kernel regression.
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Fortunately, my brother had won a set of CDs with a collection of programs that included some free software and demos. In one of them, there was StarOffice, which allowed me to create my presentation. When finished, I saved it both as an .sdd file and a converted .ppt file.
That was a long time ago. I thought I had lost the presentation forever, but I found an old CD containing only the original .sdd thesis presentation. Logically, I wanted to see it.
I had seen LibreOffice deal with .sdd files before, so, when I got the dialog asking me for a program to open the ancient presentation, I knew that something was wrong.
There was simply no way to open it.
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Twenty years ago today Microsoft released Windows 3.11 while today Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.11-rc5 kernel. He wished he could have released Linux 3.11 kernel final today, but that didn’t happen.
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Graphics Stack
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A set of patches were published this weekend to improve the Nouveau NVIDIA Gallium3D graphics driver’s handling of video playback acceleration for certain scenarios.
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The Common Display Framework (CDF) proposal for the Linux kernel that started last year is still being worked on. The CDF code is now up to its third revision, but this isn’t likely to be the final revision before pushing it for mainline inclusion.
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While there’s an X.Org 7.8 Wiki page that mentions planned features like XWayland integration and video driver hot-plugging, there isn’t active work towards putting out the X.Org 7.8 katamari nor specifically on delivering these mentioned features.
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Precise vBlank timing support has been patched for the Nouveau DRM driver to support the NV50 through NVC0 NVIDIA GPUs (up to and through Fermi but not yet any NVD0 or Kepler hardware).
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The open-source and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver is now able to tap the more recent “VP3″ and “VP4″ video encode/decode engines on recent NVIDIA GPUs that make up NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD technology. With utilizing these VP3/VP4 engines, there can be MPEG-2 and VC-1 acceleration using this hardware.
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Benchmarks
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The official release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 (codenamed “Sokndal”) is expected in the next week. With the imminent release of our industry-leading open-source automated benchmarking platform for Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris, here’s a look at some of the top features coming. Aside from just those carrying out the benchmarks, many of the features also benefit those viewing the results — such as Phoronix.com readers.
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Applications
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The other day my son asked me to put some music on his iPod. The music he wanted was on a CD. “No problem at all” I said to my son and I used his computer to set about the task in hand.
My son’s laptop runs Windows 7 and the tool I use to grab music from a CD in Windows is called Audiograbber. This piece of software is well over 10 years old but I have never found anything that does the job better on the Windows platform and what is more is that it is free.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Install Raspbian from a USB stick for a quick and easy installation
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Some time have passed since I was talking about new features of the current development version of Krita. But there are lots of them actually! Let me show them to you 
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It has been almost 3 weeks since I’ve been back from Akademy 2013 which was held in the splendid city of Bilbao this year, and it would be foolish to not write about my experiences there, since memories however bright they might be, can easily fade away with time.
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The first release candidate for KDE’s Plasma Media Center 1.1 release is now available. Plasma Media Center supports viewing photographs, watching movies, and listening to music from one central KDE component.
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With respect to touch input, most parts of KDE can be handled very easily. However, one, imho, very important aspect, simply lacks all touch UI support: the lock screen (and also the login screen), right now, do not support touch UIs at all.
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This Friday (16th) there will be a release party in Wirtshaus Troll in Stuttgart starting at 19:00 to celebrate the awesome 4.11 release of the KDE SC. For more information (also about other release parties) check the Wiki
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New Releases
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The 64bit and 32bit versions of Netrunner 13.06 are available for download:
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Two days ago, I wrote of a countdown appearing on the elementary OS website. Tonight, the countdown ended, and we finally got to know what it was all about. As many of us, including myself, were suspecting, we were counting down to the release of elementary OS Luna.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I have never reviewed Mageia before and there is a reason for that. Mageia has always been my “Eleanor”.
The “Eleanor” reference comes from the film “Gone in 60 seconds” and refers to the one car that Nicolas Cage cannot steal because something happens when he tries to do so.
Mageia has always given me that sort of a problem. I tried Mageia 1 and 2 without success and rather than write a bad review I decided to write nothing at all.
Mageia though appears to be one of the more popular distributions and I can’t just go on in this fashion. Therefore I have installed it, tried it and now I am going to tell you about my experience.
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Some of it is at least, we’ve released the live isos today which you should find on your nearest mirror.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 13.08 is a modern and easy to use Linux distribution based on Gentoo, following an extreme, yet reliable, rolling release model. This is a monthly release generated, tested and published to mirrors by our build servers containing the latest and greatest collection of software available in the Entropy repositories. The ChangeLog files related to this release are available on our mirrors. Linux Kernel 3.10.4 with BFQ iosched, updated external ZFS filesystem support, GNOME 3.8.4, KDE 4.10.5, MATE 1.6.2, Xfce 4.10, LibreOffice 4.1, UEFI SecureBoot for 64 bit images (with bundled UEFI shell), systemd as default init system, Plymouth as default splash system and new high-dpi artwork are just some of the things you will find inside the box. Please read on to know where to find the images and their torrent files on our mirrors.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Early start as always, and folks started assembling in the auditorium for the world famous state of Fedora talk from our lovely Fedora Project Leader. She talked about love and why we love Fedora and how you follow what you love. There’s a lot of passion in the room for making things better and moving Fedora forward.
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Debian Family
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Linux containers (LXC) is a lightweight virtualization technology build into Linux kernel. Unlike other virtualization technologies, the virtual machines (VM) are driven without any overhead by the kernel already running on the computer. In VM you run only the processes you need, most of the time without even going trough the regular SysV or Linux init. This means that memory is used very conservatively. These lightweight containers are sometimes called application containers, as opposed to distribution containers where you run a full distro starting with SysV/Linux init.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Electronista reports that Canonical has adjusted its Kickstarter campaign for the Ubuntu Edge smartphone again to generate more high-dollar pledges. The company is now offering the smartphone for $695 instead of its full $830 price as originally set when the Ubuntu Edge Kickstarter project launched on July 22. Currently, there are 12 days left, and Canonical has only managed to generate just under $9.3 million out of the project’s $32 million goal.
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It looks less and less likely that Canonical will raise the $32-million it needs for the Ubuntu Edge. So what! It won’t matter in the long run.
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Earlier this week ‘Phased Updates’ were enabled for Ubuntu 13.04 – but what are they?
Worry ye not: we’re here with a quick overview of what this sci-fi-sounding change is and what it will mean to you going forward.
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Flavours and Variants
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I have used Deepin Linux earlier but never got time to actually pen down a review. It is based on Ubuntu but uses the GNOME shell rather than Unity and comes with great support for Chinese language. I am no expert in Chinese and hence, downloaded the 32-bit English version of Linux Deepin for this test.
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You might have noticed that posting in this space has been rather non existent for a while. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in FLOSS, nor is it because of a lack of ideas or desire to post. It’s just that things have gotten in the way.
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Take control of your Raspberry Pi from your smartphone, tablet or PC, from anywhere in the world
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Phones
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Android
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I think I’m going to start using the term “app” to mean “all the pieces you need to build to have a deliverable piece of software.” Because three-letter words are good, and anyhow that’s what the actual people out there who use what we build are starting to say.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There it is. The world can and does accept tablets as legitimate PCs capable of doing almost everything and being portable besides.
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That’s all gone now. When a retailer like Wal-mart has the temerity to use a term like “Tablet PC”, they are going off-script.
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Acer has told investors that it will reduce its emphasis on Windows PCs and laptops over the next few quarters in favor of devices based on operating systems from Microsoft’s archrival Google.
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Google has turned to GitHub to take two of its most popular Chrome experiments to the Open Source development community.
If you recall last July, London’s Science Museum entered into a year-long collaboration with Google called Web Lab, a collaborative project featuring a range of interactive Chrome experiments designed to bring the inner workings of the Web to life.
Visitors to the free exhibition, which will close this Sunday, were given five separate experiments to get involved with.
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My nearly 11 minute keynote at OSCON 2013 this year, felt long enough when I gave it, but in terms of what I have to say about the future of open source, it wasn’t even close.
Here I expand on the lessons I’ve learned from other people working in open source, new technologies emerging in open source that haven’t come of age yet, my passion for open source not being a Zero Sum game, and bringing open source to other parts of society and industry.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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In another important milestone for Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile phone platform, the ZTE Open Firefox OS phone is set to start selling soon via eBay’s stores in the U.S. and U.K. ZTE and Mozilla officials confirmed the news on Monday, noting that unlocked phones will sell for $79.99. Thus far, phones based on Mozilla’s open mobile OS have been targeted at emerging markets, including several Latin American, countries. The phones will be orange, as seen here, and users in the U.S. and U.K. will be able to pick their carrier networks.
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Education
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I’ve been working in educational technology for more than 17 years and have spent much of my career advocating for open source in schools. For years, open source in education has gotten a bad rap. Superintendents, school boards and teachers frequently misunderstood open source software to be synonymous with dubious code birthed by mad, degenerate “hackers” who spend dark nights scheming to unleash complex and nefarious plots for social disruption.
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People still doubt my claims that GNU/Linux and FLOSS thrives in education but my experience in the bush in northern Canada is not unique.
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Healthcare
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Nonprofit OSEHRA brings together community of software developers, clinicians, business leaders and other practitioners
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Project Releases
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OpenIndiana, the operating system seeking to let Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris project live on within the open-source community, is finally out with an update. This isn’t a stable OpenIndiana release but rather is still a pre-release to 151a.
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Openness/Sharing
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Australian Jonathan Oxer, VK3FADO, who passed his amateur radio Foundation exam in February, is one of the designers of the two CubeSats ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X which arrived at the ISS on Friday, August 8.
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Architects and community leaders are combining forces to lead the way in creating many types of innovative housing in developing nations as part of an open-source collaboration.
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There’s a lot of talk recently about Amazon’s “Kindle Worlds” project, but that just seems to be a way to acknowledge fan-fic and make a profit from it. What about a system that follows the F/OSS philosophy for entertainment? Would you get on board?
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BM has joined other technology firms to form the OpenPOWER Consortium – an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture.
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The Google Reader service was launched in 2005 and built up a faithful user base of millions over the years. This aggregator of content served by web feeds offered an undeniably intuitive way for users to access a stream of updates from selected websites, enabling them to easily keep tabs on their favourite websites. Following the announcement in March 2013 that Google was to close the doors to this service – it closed July 2013 – millions of users have had to seek an alternative feed-reading service. How many made the right choice?
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Science
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Mark Miodownik, presenter from Dara O Briain’s Science Club on BBC Two, reveals how you can perform simple science experiments at home. Try some DIY science and see the microscopic world up close by turning a webcam inside out…
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Health/Nutrition
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“We are very concerned as there are news that feed testing will start this year and that the harvest will be used in these feed experiments. In China, the people have protested against the feed trials on children, prompting proponents to compensate the affected families. We do not want our people, especially our children to be used in these experiments.” – Sikwal GMO
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A group of activist farmers in the Philippines stormed a government research facility and destroyed an area of genetically modified rice crops the size of 10 football fields. According to New Scientist, the farmers say that genetically modified organism (GMO) foods have not been established to be safe for consumption and that the real solution to world hunger isn’t biologically engineered plants, but a reduction in worldwide rates of poverty.
“The Golden Rice is a poison,” said Willy Marbella to New Scientist. Marbella is a farmer and deputy secretary general of a group of activists known as KMP — Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas or Peasant Movement of the Philippines.
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You might use nanotechnology in the sunscreens you squirt or lather on your kids. You might like your lips and taste it in your favorite lip-gloss. You might even eat it in your Jell-O pudding. But is it safe?
Well, that’s a tricky question.
“Before you can do a risk assessment, you have to be able to do an exposure assessment and a toxicity assessment,” says Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen. “And they really can’t be done yet with nanoparticles. So it makes doing a risk assessment really hard. And there is increasing evidence that particles at the nanoscale can have more of a toxic effect. And that shouldn’t be surprising.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Between 800 and 3,500 people were killed – mostly older men, women and children – by Israeli-backed, far-right Christian Phalangist militias between September 16 and 18, 1982.
The Israeli army had invaded Lebanon in June of that year in an attempt to remove the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and its leader, Yasser Arafat, and had succeeded in forcing their departure a week earlier.
Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/west-turned-blind-eye-to-israels-involvement-in-sabra-and-shatila-slaughter#ixzz2bhbGe8SR
Follow us: @TheNationalUAE on Twitter | thenational.ae on Facebook
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I have encountered two separate Yemens this past week: the one portrayed in Western media outlets and the other reality of living in Sana’a. One was rife with conflict and insecurity, the other associated with the navigation of the capital’s gridlocked traffic. Yet the two Yemens collided in a visceral way for most people.
The al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) plot, described vaguely by President Obama as a “threat stream”, and the subsequent US embassy closure in Sana’a were far from the minds of most Yemenis. Most were more preoccupied with the approaching conclusion of Ramadan, the Eid al-Fitr celebrations and the political direction of the nation, most notably the United Nations-backed National Dialogue Conference, which aims at drafting a new constitution before elections in February.
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To better understand the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and who is considered a threat we must first ask ourselves “What is a terrorist?” By definition, a terrorist is a person or group of people that cause fear and panic in others by their words or actions. The US government would have us believe that “covered persons” refers to “terrorists” such as al-Qaida or the Taliban.
However, that is not clearly written in the NDAA. The NDAA only mentions “covered persons.” The government, therefore, could effectively use the NDAA with its indefinite detention and lack of due process against anyone it considers a terrorist. This includes peaceful groups such as the Free State Project and the Occupy movement.
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The Santiago Times speaks to Carlos Busso, an investigative journalist, about his new book on the CIA in Chile, why Allende was a threat and the unofficial story of the coup.
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Some years ago, a Western journalist described Yemen as “history’s last departure lounge.” But nobody even in their wildest imagination would have thought this Arab country would one day become the latest theater of America’s drone war and bizarre killings.
Yes, US missile strikes and civilian casualties coupled with a near total absence of government services and deepening poverty is making Yemen the magnet of the very groups US wants to destroy as part of the war on terror.
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The guidelines for use of drone aircraft by governmental agencies are simple and clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
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The people who wrote the Fourth Amendment could not foresee drones, but they were wise enough to outlaw warrantless searches without specifying how the search would be carried out.
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U.S. buying even more hardware for Yemen’s military 09 Aug 2013 U.S. drones have been battering Yemen, killing at least 28 people, and American spy planes watch from overhead. And now, Yemen’s skies are looking to get even more crowded. The U.S. Navy is helping the Yemeni air force buy 12 light spy planes, adding to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military aid the U.S. has given to the Sana’a regime. The Navy’s Light Observation Aircraft for Yemen program aims to buy 12 small planes — or maybe choppers — equipped with infrared and night vision cameras and the ability to beam the images collected by those cameras back to a ground station.[Gee, looks like arming the murderous regime in Yemen is sequester-proof. Ditto the Syrian rebels aka cannibals. This is *insane.* Start reading.]
Yemeni Al Qaeda expert casts doubt on terror threat claims 11 Aug 2013 Yemen’s foremost Al Qaeda researcher says recent U.S. drone strikes have failed to kill senior leaders of the organization, and he dismisses claims that a plot to bomb a Canadian-owned oil facility was foiled by Yemeni authorities. Abdulrazzaq al-Jamal, a journalist and researcher who has been given exclusive access to the terrorist group’s Yemen branch, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said the series of drone strikes in the past 12 days have killed 32 people, including low-level foot soldiers and civilians.
Yemenis call U.S. drone strikes an overreaction to al Qaida threat 09 Aug 2013 The United States launching of eight drone strikes in Yemen in the span of 13 days has ignited widespread outrage in the country. The anger over the strikes, which came as an al Qaida-related threat shuttered U.S. embassies and consulates in Yemen and 15 other countries, has overwhelmed attention to the threat itself, which many here view skeptically anyway.
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Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who has served five months of a thirty-month sentence in the federal correctional institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania, has written a fourth letter from the prison.
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Transparency Reporting
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The Haverfordwest mother of a young US soldier facing the rest of his life in prison admits she is unlikely to see him again.
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A short video secretly filmed inside the court martial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier convicted of giving classified files to WikiLeaks, has emerged on the internet in a second major breach of courtroom security.
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Prosecution witness suggests terror organizations saw little benefit from documents Manning released
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You may have watched or heard the leader’s debate last night that covered the subjects of boats, the economy, tax and the NBN.
But did you hear much about monitoring government practice, governmental and public service transparency, internet freedom or your right to protest?
The fact that you didn’t is a major failure by the system and the media who monitors it, according to the new political party; Wikileaks.
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How the FBI used a baby-faced WikiLeaks volunteer to spy on Julian Assange.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Last week, for the first time, the Securities and Exchange Commission won a case against an individual banker for fraudulent behavior leading to the financial meltdown of 2008-09.
Hold the applause. The banker was a mid-level executive. It was a civil case; he will face other penalties but will not be going to jail. The U.S. government’s record remains intact. It has sent no one from Wall Street to jail for playing a role in the financial crisis.
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The number of Americans who decided to renounce their citizenship in the second quarter of 2013 increased sixfold the same period in 2012, a number the federal government attributes to strict impending financial disclosure rules.
The United States is the only country out of 34 in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that continues to tax citizens regardless of where they live around the world.
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The secret is that the Federal Reserve can’t really control the economy at all. It can influence it. And the influence it has is all negative; that’s the joke. Setting interest rates at any level other than that chosen by willing borrowers and lenders, the Fed distorts the price of credit. And distorting prices always leads to problems…either shortages or surpluses.
Also, by fixing rates at ultra-low levels, the Federal Reserve is actually stealing from one group and giving to another. The middle class, savers, and working people lose wealth. Hedge fund managers, bankers, zombies…and, of course, those loveable feds themselves…gain.
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The Wall Street Journal editorial board’s Stephen Moore falsely claimed that the drastic budget cuts known as sequestration have had “none of the anticipated negative consequences,” when in reality economists have explained that the cuts have had devastating effects on economic growth, jobs, and programs for low-income Americans.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent months it is, in the words of the New York Times, that “the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.”
“Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next ‘Matrix’ movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare,” the paper reported.
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Censorship
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…access to site was blocked due to “violent content”.
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Privacy
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Without this publicity and consequent public awareness about the program, the president would probably just have let sleeping dogs lie and let the program continue without change. Snowden’s revelations and their consequent effects have forced Obama at least to go through the motions of reform to get ahead of the game. This has been combined with a huge increase in warnings of a global terror threat that can be used to convince the public that the surveillance programs are essential to their security. As a recent article put it, Snowden, Greenwald and whistle blowers were winning. A poll showed that most Americans thought of Snowden as a whistle blower rather than a traitor.
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Fred Cate penned a brief with other law professors asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s order authorizing the government to collect the data. He argues the intelligence court’s 2006 order violates the Patriot Act and “and presents a significant risk to the personal privacy of millions.”
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On Thursday, Aug. 1, I appeared on Fox News’s Your World With Neil Cavuto to talk about the ongoing NSA revelations triggered by Edward Snowden, and where Americans should “draw the line” between liberty and security:
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Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden and others understand their obligation as honorable citizens to protect and defend the honor of those who once had the courage to dedicate their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to making truth and integrity a way of life for all peoples starting right here at home. Many lost their fortunes and their lives doing so. We are no longer being led by such people although there are many people living in the United States today who do have the courage, the honor, and the ability to do what our Founders did.
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The state and federal Do-Not-Call programs are a joke.
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Elysium actor Matt Damon has been known as a big supporter of President Obama, especially during his presidential campaign in 2008. However, it seems Damon has soured on the president, judging by a recent interview. During an interview with BET, Damon suggested that it feels like he and the President of the United States have separated. Damon told BET, “He (President Obama) broke up with me.”
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Van Jones, a former special adviser to President Barack Obama for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, and co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” has described the statement the president made Tuesday on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” that the government does not having a spying program as “ridiculous.”
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Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, in a wide-ranging interview talks about the corrupting nature of big data, the end of privacy and the rise of the surveillance society. He also shared his thoughts on Moore’s Law and its marriage to public policy, and why Silent Circle shutdown its email-service.
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Given the frenetic nature of the news, I didn’t think I would get a chance to have a measured discussion with Zimmermann. Much to my surprise, he got on the phone and we ended up discussing everything from the rise of the surveillance state; big data and its devastating impact on society; data totalitarianism; the somewhat dubious role of Google and Facebook in our lives; and why as a society we can’t fall victim to the cynicism that is starting to permeate our lives. He also talked at length about the important role of our legislators in pushing back against the unstoppable tide of the “surveillance society.”
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We already wrote about the bombshell revelation from the Guardian that the NSA changed the rules in October of 2011, so that it had permission to do warrantless searches on US persons (contrary to public claims). However, Marcy Wheeler recognized the date of that update is the very same date that the FISA court supposedly smacked down the NSA for violating the 4th Amendment with some searches.
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On August 5 malicious software (malware) in the form of a Java Script (JS) attack code was discovered embedded in multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting (FH), the largest hosting company on the anonymous Tor network. Initial research into the malware by experts suggests that it originated from and returned private data back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or other US government agencies.
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….but Big Brother also charges us to spy on us.
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Most likely, these people would be put on other work rather than fired.
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W
While I attended President Obama’s Friday news conference, which largely dealt with surveillance and security, I couldn’t help but wonder whether one man, eight time zones away, was watching: Edward Snowden.
Having lived in Moscow for many years, I know the Russian capital has many Friday night diversions — but what could been more interesting for Snowden than to watch the president of the United States continue to react to his bombshell revelations? Snowden probably gets a kick out of hearing the president mention his name, too — the ultimate validation of his own importance. Indeed, the president even devalued himself by taunting Snowden. If Snowden is so sure of himself and his views, Obama said, why not return home, get a lawyer, and make his case in court?
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One of the more ridiculous claim’s during President Obama’s press conference on NSA surveillance today was the claim that he had already started this process prior to the Ed Snowden leaks and that it’s likely we would end up in the same place. While he admitted that Snowden may have “accelerated” the process, he’s also claiming that the leaks put our national security at risk.
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Even more to the point, his comments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of why the public doesn’t trust the government. That’s because he keeps insisting that the program isn’t being abused and that all of this collection is legal. But, really, that’s not what the concern is about. Even though we actually know that the NSA has a history of abuse (and other parts of the intelligence community before that), a major concern is that scooping up so much data is considered legal in the first place.
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President Barack Obama made it clear Friday he has no intention of stopping the daily collection of American phone records. And while he offered “appropriate reforms,” he blamed government leaks for creating distrust of his domestic spying program.
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Following our post on the NSA’s document defending its surveillance programs, let’s look more closely at the Justice Department’s “white paper” explaining the legal rationale for scooping up all of the metadata on every phone call under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, also known as the “business records” or “tangible things” section. This document just focuses on that one program, rather than the many other programs, and within its 23 pages there are so many ridiculous things. I’m sure we’ll come back to many of them in future posts. After going through it a few times, it seems abundantly clear that this was a rush job by the administration to defend this particular program, without realizing just how ridiculous many of its claims are. As Julian Sanchez has noted, the arguments made in this document appear to contradict the DOJ’s actions in dozens of ways, and basically invalidates a ton of previous arguments concerning other surveillance programs. And, worse, it more or less opens the door for massive surveillance on a variety of other things. Again from Sanchez, the argument in this paper could easily apply to having a local prosecutor subpoena all city phone records looking for drug dealing. Because safety!
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During the Q&A portion of today’s President Obama press conference, reporter Chuck Todd asked Obama about Ed Snowden and whether he was a “patriot,” after Obama announced some reforms and even directly made clear that those who support civil liberties and greater transparency “love their country” and are “patriots.” Except, Obama said that he does not think Snowden is a patriot, in part because he had signed the Whistleblower Protection Act and extended the protections to the intelligence community. This is laughable on a variety of levels, including the Obama administration’s actions against other whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and William Binney, who did go through official channels, and then were subject to ridiculous investigations and (with Drake) totally trumped up charges on a bogus unrelated issue.
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Smartbins use devices’ Wi-Fi connections to log their MAC address and track customer habits
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Defenders of the NSA’s program always point to two things: it’s all legal and it’s all subject to oversight. Part of the “oversight” is the FISA “thumbs up” system that has approved every request for two years in a row. The other part of the “oversight” is Congress itself.
Unfortunately, members of Congress have been lied to directly about the extent of the collections occurring under Section 215 (and 702), so that’s one strike against the “oversight.” Now, it appears that members of Congress are being selectively provided with information about the programs.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says President Obama’s plans to make changes in National Security Agency surveillance programs stem from a single source: Edward Snowden.
Obama “validated Edward Snowden’s role as a whistle-blower” with his proposals to revamp NSA programs, Assange said in a written statement Saturday.
“But rather than thank Edward Snowden, the president laughably attempted to criticize him while claiming that there was a plan all along, ‘before Edward Snowden,’” Assange said. “The simple fact is that without Snowden’s disclosures, no one would know about the programs and no reforms could take place.”
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President Barack Obama says he will work with Congress to review US surveillance programmes and the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA), following the whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations of a programme of mass surveillance of electronic communications, including emails and Skype calls.
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The father of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, complained Sunday about the “political theater” surrounding his son’s disclosures of secret surveillance programs and dismissed President Obama’s proposed reforms as “superficial.”
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For President Barack Obama, August was supposed to be the time when a major immigration bill landed on his desk.
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Stickonspy sells die-cut stickers that go around your laptop’s webcam to remind yourself — and others — that spooks from western governments have made a practice of using spyware that allows them to covertly switch on laptop and mobile phone cameras and microphones to spy on their owners. $3 for one, $10 for 6.
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US fugitive Edward Snowden’s defense fund, launched recently by WikiLeaks to raise money for the legal protection of the NSA leaker, has announced it now accepts donations in virtual currency Bitcoin.
The Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund (JSPD) was set up on August 9 with the goal to provide legal as well as campaign aid to journalistic sources. Snowden, who is behind the biggest intelligence leak in the history of the US National Security Agency (NSA), has been selected the first such source.
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A recent federal court ruling that sanctioned the warrantless tracking of American cellular users was deeply troubling. It revealed a disturbing expansion in the scope of power of U.S. executive bodies and has sparked a great distrust among the American people of federal and state authorities.
In what has become, as the New York Times describes, “a routine tool” for state and federal agents, cell-phone tracking remains a topic many law enforcement officials shy away from discussing. The popularity of the practice has led to its adoption by many local police departments and has become the most prevalent invasive way government officials invade personal privacy.
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The former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.
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But we soon discovered that also was not true either. We learned in another Guardian newspaper article last week that the top secret “X-Keyscore” program allows even low-level analysts to “search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”
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Huey Long once said fascism will arrive “wrapped in an American flag.” In “Friendly Fascism,” Bertram Gross (1912 – 1997) called Ronald Reagan its prototype ruler. Gross didn’t know Obama.
He represents the worst of rogue governance. He advances America’s imperium. He heads its police state apparatus. He’s waging war on humanity. He’s doing it abroad and at home.
He puts a smiling face on repression. He’s hardline. He’s ruthless. He’s done what supporters thought impossible. He exceeds the worst of George Bush. He says one thing. He does another. He demands it.
His promises ring hollow. He broke every major one made. He’s a serial liar. He’s a moral coward. On August 9, he defended the indefensible. He did so disingenuously.
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As more and more becomes known about blanket spying by the National Security Agency, one thing is becoming increasingly apparent. Government officials are deliberately and repeatedly misleading Congress and the US public in a concerted effort to conceal as much as possible about what the NSA is actually doing.
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Details of a top secret U.S. National Security Agency program for culling intelligence from the internet indicate that at least one computer server was or is located in Ukraine, the Guardian wrote on July 31, citing documents provided by former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.
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Two of Germany’s biggest Internet service providers said Friday they will start encrypting customers’ emails by default in response to user concerns about online snooping after reports that the U.S. National Security Agency monitors international electronic communications.
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Germany is considered to be of ‘mid-level’ interest to the US National Security Agency with the European Union a key priority of spying targets, reports weekly Der Spiegel, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
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A controversial US surveillance programme that sweeps Internet usage data had 700 snooping servers installed at 150 locations around the world, including one in India, according to a report.
The XKeyscore programme, run by the National Security Agency (NSA), allowed analysts to search through vast databases containing e-mails, online chats and browsing histories of millions of individuals, the Guardian reported, citing documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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A source in the Russian special services said with “practically 100 percent certainty” that a server supporting the NSA surveillance system XKeyscore is located in the American embassy in Moscow.
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Several stories concerning the National Security Agency spying on U.S. citizens surfaced recently.
British newspaper The Guardian reported on a computer program called XKeyScore. This program allows civilian hackers working for the NSA to fill out a form which gives them access to our email and phone call contents. It can give them recorded files, or real-time email, chat, text or phone-call communications.
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The European Union is ranked as a key priority by the NSA for monitoring a German newspaper reported Saturday, citing a document leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s father has secured documents to visit his son in Russia and plans to discuss how he could fight espionage charges, Lon Snowden and his attorney said Sunday.
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Secretary of State John Kerry’s trip to Colombia and Brazil this week builds on efforts to deepen relations with Latin America, but he can expect a curt reception from the two U.S. allies after reports that an American spy program widely targeted data in emails and telephone calls across the region.
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For decades, the NSA has routinely monitored the phone calls, and before emails, the telegrams of thousands of Americans. The rationale has always been the same, and Obama has repeatedly said it in defense of the spy program, and that’s that the surveillance has done much to protect Americans from foreign threats and attacks. The NSA recently tossed out the figure of 42 terrorist acts that it supposedly nipped in the bud because of the spy program. The problem with that is the agency’s history. Its named targets in the past have not been solely alleged Muslim extremists, but Communists, peace activists, black radicals, civil rights leaders, and even drug peddlers.
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The website is called Zeekly.com and founder Jeffrey Sisk explains it doesn’t retain search history, and also runs on 2048-bit SSL encryption to keep private what Internet users don’t want public.
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On Friday, President Obama delivered a speech meant to answer Americans’ concerns about NSA surveillance. Like most 50-minute speeches by major politicians, it amounts to 50 minutes of life we’ll never get back, and little substance.
The take-away from the speech is that President Obama is “comfortable” with the surveillance program exactly as it already exists, and the “reforms,” to the extent of which they will happen at all, center on his quote “how do I make the American people more comfortable.”
In effect, this means a PR campaign to convince the public that what the NSA is doing is okay, and it is noteworthy that one of the major “reforms” announced was having the intelligence agencies make a website to sell the programs to the public.
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Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said Obama could have used his “bully pulpit” to allay fears among the public that the National Security Agency was snooping on their private telephone and Internet communications.
“What I’m very critical of him for is basically he’s been silent for the last two months,” said King, an outspoken proponent of anti-terrorism intelligence efforts. “He has allowed the Edward Snowdens and the others of the world to dominate the media, and now we have so many people who actually think the NSA is spying on people.”
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Some senior Republicans in Congress on Sunday threw cold water on a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s plan to revamp the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs–his proposal to provide a new advocate for privacy concerns.
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One tool is Tor, a free service that is described as “virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet” by providing “the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.”
Tor makes it possible to avoid being tracked by web sites use and to use email, chat and other services anonymously. It also allows users to access services that may be blocked by their Internet service provider (in some countries by government order).
A new iPhonem, Android, Windows and Blackberry app called Seecrypt“allows you to make and receive unlimited, secure voice calls and text messages between Seecrypt Mobile-enabled devices, anywhere in the world.”
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Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden addressed President Obama’s promises of more “transparency” for the surveillance programs, saying that his goal is just to make Americans comfortable enough to accept the program.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s father has secured documents to visit his son in Russia and plans to discuss how he could fight espionage charges, Lon Snowden and his attorney said Sunday.
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Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz is working on a highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server. It comes as the US squeezes email providers that offer encryption and Mega’s CEO calls Lavabit’s shutdown an “honorable act of Privacy Seppuku.”
Mega’s Chief Executive Vikram Kumar, who is heading the development of the company’s own end-to-end encryption technology to protect the privacy of the future email’s users, has reacted to the Lavabit founder’s decision to suspend his service’s operations – an act, which was shortly followed by voluntary closing down of another secure email service, Silent Circle.
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Senator Saxby Chambliss is either a blind war hawk or is deliberately misleading the public. Last week, after the National Security Agency had intercepted an al-Qaida conference call plotting attacks against U.S. embassies, Chambliss claimed it was proof that mass surveillance programs were effective. But the AP reports that the NSA’s controversial phone and Internet monitoring programs “played no part in detecting the initial tip.”
The press should have known — and reported on — the fact that Chambliss had a history of hawkish interpretations of intelligence reports after he voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Indeed, the most ardent defenders of the NSA are exactly those members of Congress who wrongly believed we needed to invade Iraq after believing that there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.
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Now we know all Americans’ international email is searched and saved, we can see how far the ‘collect it all’ mission has gone
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In the wake of the Obama Administration’s nod towards greater transparency for its surveillance programs, some members of Congressional intelligence and judiciary committees now say that they have not had the proper opportunity to understand, much less challenge these programs.
“In terms of the oversight function, I feel inadequate most of the time,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. She spoke with The Washington Post on Saturday evening, admitting that while the programs were “approved” by Congress—”Was it approved by a fully knowing Congress? That is not the case.”
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Russia, alongside the EU, China and Iran, are on top of the NSA’s spying priority list, according to a document leaked by fugitive Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel weekly.
In the classified document, dated April 2013, countries are assigned levels of interest for NSA surveillance from 1 (the highest) to 5 (the lowest).
Among the top surveillance targets are China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and Afghanistan. The EU, as a whole is also ranking high, though individually its 28 member-states are of lesser importance to the US intelligence, with Germany and France representing mid-level interest, while countries like Finland, Croatia and Denmark are denoted as almost irrelevant in data gathering.
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On this Sunday’s Face the Nation, New York Congressman Peter King denounced the beating the NSA’s reputation has taken as a result of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the organization’s surveillance programs, arguing that “loose words” like “spying” and “snooping” unfairly diminished the patriotism of NSA staff and officials.
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Russia, alongside the EU, China and Iran, are on top of the NSA’s spying priority list, according to a document leaked by fugitive Edward Snowden and published by Der Spiegel weekly.
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The US president, Barack Obama, sought to reassure his country, as well as his allies, with a public review and additional oversight of US national security surveillance programmes, but observers said the steps do little to address the core issues at the heart of public concern over the practices.
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These programs have only one objective, and they cannot be reformed or “controlled” or otherwise fixed. Their objective is to reduce the people of the whole Earth under absolute tyranny.
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Much of President Obama’s defense of the NSA surveillance program yesterday came down to it being under the oversight of all three branches of the federal government, himself, the Congress, and the secret judges that signed off on the warrants.
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Ladar Levison, 32, has spent ten years building encrypted email service Lavabit, attracting over 410,000 users. When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was revealed to be one of those users in July, Dallas-based Lavabit got a surge of new customers: $12,000 worth of paid subscribers, triple his usual monthly sign-up. On Thursday, though, Levison pulled the plug on his company, posting a cryptic message about a government investigation that would force him to “become complicit in crimes against the American people” were he to stay in business. Many people have speculated that the investigation concerned the government trying to get access to the email of Edward Snowden, who has been charged with espionage. There are legal restrictions which prevent Levison from being more specific about a protest of government methods that has forced him to shutter his company, an unprecedented move.
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Civil Rights
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The code is a step in the right direction towards bringing proper oversight to the millions of cameras that capture our movements every day. However, with only a small fraction of cameras covered and without any penalties for breaking the code, we hope that this is only the beginning of the process and that further steps will be taken in the future to protect people’s privacy from unjustified or excessive surveillance.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Australia’s home entertainment industry lobby has slammed the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) over its handling of a review of the country’s copyright regime.
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A couple of months back, Techdirt wrote about Australia’s proposals to shift from the current fair dealing approach to fair use as part of wide-ranging reform of copyright there. When something similar was mooted in the UK as part of what became the Hargreaves Review, it was shouted down by the copyright maximalists on the grounds that it would lead to widespread litigation. As Mike pointed out at the time, that’s nonsense: the existence of a large body of US case law dealing with this area makes it much easier to bring in fair use without the need for its contours to be defined in the courts.
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Send this to a friend
08.11.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you are working in the open source space, you have all the chances of being hired by the biggies. Linux jobs are on the rise, claims Ralf Flaxa, vice president, Engineering, SUSE. And he has his reasons for making this claim.
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Desktop
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The most recent complement to the developments taking place in the education sector in this country is the ‘One Laptop per Student’ initiative. On Friday, December 3rd, 2010, over two thousand laptops arrived in the state and were officially handed over to Dr. the Honourable Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
On Monday February 28, 2011 another shipment of just under 13,000 net books is anticipated to arrive at the E.T. Joshua Airport. During the month of March 2011, the Ministry of Education will deliver an aggressive public awareness effort at the level of the educational institutions.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Last month I reported on the effort by a lone individual to try crowd-funded Mesa development. The developer wants to implement a new OpenGL extension in Mesa while providing some documentation on the process. For showing he’s true to his word, he published some experimental Mesa code today for the GL_KHR_debug extension.
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A set of six patches were published for Mesa on Friday that allow for profiling support with Gallium3D’s “Clover” state tracker for OpenCL support.
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Applications
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Things have gotten a little serious lately, what with macchanger and gnupg out there.
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Giada is a free, minimal, hardcore audio tool for DJs, live performers and electronic musicians. How does it work? Just pick up your channel, fill it with samples or MIDI events and start the show by using this tiny piece of software as a loop machine, drum machine, sequencer, live sampler or yet as a plugin/effect host. Giada aims to be a compact and portable virtual device for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for production use and live sets.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The original Half-Life game, the one launched all the way back in 1998 and recently ported on the Linux platform, has just received a major update.
Valve is trying to make sure that its games run flawlessly, even 14 years later. With this in mind, an update has been released for Half-Life Beta.
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Two-person studio Micro Macro Games has released the PC and Android alpha build of its beautiful, hand-illustrated adventure game about insects, Morphopolis.
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The developers of Strike Suit Zero tweeted to us to let everyone know that the game is now out of beta and anyone can now purchase it and play.
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I’ve often wondered what’s more upsetting; being set on fire only to have the fire put out with buckets of urine, or a new Humble Bundle for Windows only. Well, I’ve yet to be set of fire and put out with a firehose-style golden shower, but regardless of the fact, I’m infinitely disappointed by Windows-only Humble Bundles. However this latest bundle has almost been remedied by Guido Eickmeyer, Creative Director at Deep Silver. Just hours ago, Guido started a popular AMA thread over on Reddit.
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This is probably a game I will personally be spending a fair amount of time on, we don’t really have a game like it yet (Unvanquished is close but far from finished).
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Gunpoint is a stealth puzzle game that lets you rewire its levels to trick people.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After the feedback we have received (you guys are awesome), we have made some improvements and fixes to KDEConnect.
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Some time have passed since I was talking about new features of the current development version of Krita. But there are lots of them actually! Let me show them to you
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) 3.9.5 package, as well as the stable 3.8.4 release.
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The fifth development version of the upcoming GNOME Photos 3.10 photo viewer and organizer application for the GNOME desktop environment has been released a few days ago.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia development team announced a few minutes ago, August 10, the immediate availability for download of the first Alpha release of the upcoming Mageia 4 operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The fact that I’m able to post a recap of the first day of Flock is really due to the excellent organization of the many staff and volunteers who are doing an amazing job making Flock accessible to remotees. I’m not actually in South Carolina, folks!
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Here’s the lineup of IRC channels we created on irc.freenode.net for remote attendees to follow along. You may want to configure them in your IRC client now to make your remote attendance easier. I’ve linked each channel name up to the freenode web client just in case it’s helpful.
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With Fedora more liberally pushing down package updates compared to Ubuntu Linux and other fixed-release distributions, how has the performance evolved since the release of “Schrödinger’s Cat” in early July? Here’s some benchmarks showing how the Fedora 19 performance has evolved with a newer kernel and other changes.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Edge project, a mobile edition of the desktop OS Ubuntu currently being crowfunded, may fall short of its goal. The smartphone, according to the company, will only be made if users pledge a total of $32 million through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. And the project comes with a strict time limit of 30 days.
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Canonical’s ambition is admirable, but with less than two weeks to raise another $23 million, the chances of the company meeting its crowdfunding target are slim, says Sophie Curtis.
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XMir, display server developed by Canonical for Linux is now available for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy salamander. XMir will be the default display server for the Ubuntu 13.10, however X server will be provided as fallback session.
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Phones
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Earlier this year there was a lot of talk of new open-sourced platforms that we were supposed to see come to fruition this year. Canonical’s Ubuntu for Android, Mozilla’s FireFox OS, Samsung’s Tizen and Jolla’s Sailfish OS were four of the more well-known ones. But since earlier this year there has been very little talk about any of these platforms, and although I initially had high hopes of seeing at least one of them succeed by this time, I wonder now if there is any reason for hope given the current state of our own four main platforms that we primarily use in the U.S. now.
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Ballnux
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Android
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Apple’s share of the worldwide smartphone operating system market declined year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013, while Android and Windows Phone saw “slight increases,” according to new data from IDC.
Overall, smartphone vendors shipped a total of 236.4 million smartphones in the second quarter, up 51.3 percent from the 156.2 million units shipped during the same period last year, the research firm said. Smartphone shipments also grew 9.3 percent over the first quarter of this year.
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A new backward-compatible version of the Android Action Bar is now being offered to developers for their apps.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google and Qualcomm seemed to have resolved their apparent dispute as Nexus 7 (2013) factory images have been published. Just a few days ago Jean-Baptiste “JBQ” Quéru, the head of Android Open Source Project, quit from the position (supposedly) due to the delay in the publishing of these images.
The arrival of factory images code named ‘razor’ means enthusiasts can now root their devices without worrying about not being able to restore it. So, I take back my previous recommendation of not buying the Nexus 7 (2013) due to lack of the factory images.
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ROM developers and Android tinkering enthusiasts alike have probably noticed at this point that the new iteration of the Nexus 7, unveiled two weeks ago, does not yet have factory images or driver binaries posted on the appropriate Google Developers page. A similar issue plagued the Nexus 4 in its early days, though eventually images were posted. At the time, legal issues were speculated as a possible reason for the delay, and Android build maintainer JBQ – largely responsible for the images / binaries – said only this in response: “I can’t comment.”
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Since officially releasing the Nexus 7 (2013), Google’s latest device has been receiving positive reviews in general. However, some issues have come up, like some GPS problems that Google is aware of and is working on a solution. Another problem that surfaced that has the potential to impact Android fans beyond those who own the new Nexus 7 have been issues revolving around the release of Qualcomm binaries for the device. The issue was so contentious, that Jean Baptiste-Queru went so far as to submit his resignation and walk away from the AOSP project due to the difficulties in getting factory images released. Apparently the bad press related to that was more than Google could fathom as they have now released the factory image and binaries, including the Qualcomm files in question.
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There it is. Qualcomm apparently decided with Google that a bit more openness was a good thing even if it is not opening the source code of those drivers. Was it an oversight? Was it a change in policy? Is Qualcomm going to become more open? We shall see.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced that the first Release Candidate version for LibreOffice 4.1.1 is now available for the Linux platform, bringing a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
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BSD
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freenas-ixsystems-new-logoFreeNAS 9.1 has been released. We have read the blog posts, the press releases, and we probably all agree that this FreeBSD based NAS is becoming better and better with each release. FreeNAS is still ‘growing up’ and new features are added to each new version.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Most notably, gNewSense 3.0, codenamed “Parkes,” is now based on Debian rather than Ubuntu. gNewSense is a fully free GNU/Linux distro and one of the growing number of GNU/Linux distributions that are endorsed by the FSF for providing and recommending only free software. gNewSense now runs on three architectures: i386, amd64 and MIPS.
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This is the video from the talks given by Christian Grothoff, Carlo von Lynx, Jacob Appelbaum and Richard Stallman in Berlin on August 1st. The talks are in English, even though the welcoming words are in German.
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Programming
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Felix Geisendörfer recently wrote Vim Trick: Open current line on GitHub. The idea is to open a repository with GitHub in a browser for the current file and line number in Vim.
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The attorneys atop six hot tech ventures have at least one thing in common: They’ve Googled it.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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But the Republican senator from Kentucky tweeted Friday that he approved of a certain kind of drone after all. And it can’t conduct surveillance or kill people.
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The Federal Aviation Administration’s recent certification of two expensive unmanned aircraft for commercial use further opens up the U.S. market for drones, but cheaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will still have to operate in regulatory limbo.
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The US has hit Yemen with seven drone strikes in a little more than a week.
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An Australian parliamentary election candidate with the anti-immigration One Nation party has quit the race following an embarrassing interview in which she called Islam a country, confused the Koran with “haram,” and said that Jews worship Jesus Christ.
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Finance
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Vanity Fair has timed the publication of its latest 11,000-word Michael Lewis opus perfectly to coincide with Fabrice Tourre being found liable on six counts of misleading investors while he worked at Goldman Sachs. Lewis also profiles a former Goldman employee charged with serious misdeeds; in his case, it’s Sergei Aleynikov. And in both cases — Aleynikov and Tourre — the government ended up in a position of overstretch.
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Privacy
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For Marcel Proust, a madeleine cookie triggered a flood of childhood memories. For me, cookies usually signify less about memories of childhood and more about information collection, often surreptitious, through bits of code inserted on unsuspecting users’ computers. Recently, though, revelations about the NSA’s information-collection efforts have brought together thoughts about surveillance and memories of my childhood.
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Barack Obama insisted on Friday that the NSA reforms he has proposed would have happened all along and that his views on surveillance programs had “not evolved”. But since the president first responded to Edward Snowden’s revelations in June he has rejected any suggestion that more safeguards were required.
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Start by switching to an alternative search engine, using an alias on Facebook, and supporting allied nonprofits. This article was written by Nick Pearson, the CEO of IVPN. IVPN is a privacy platform, and Electronic Frontier Foundation member, committed to protecting online freedoms and online privacy.
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The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
The classified document, dated April 2013, states that the US secret services are especially interested in gathering intelligence concerning the 28-member bloc’s foreign policy, international trade, and economic stability, the magazine reported.
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Rather than backing one or the other thinker, why not embrace both to inform a leftist critique of the surveillance scandal?
[...]
In light of the recent NSA surveillance scandal, Chomsky and Žižek offer us very different approaches, both of which are helpful for leftist critique. For Chomsky, the path ahead is clear. Faced with new revelations about the surveillance state, Chomsky might engage in data mining, juxtaposing our politicians’ lofty statements about freedom against their secretive actions, thereby revealing their utter hypocrisy. Indeed, Chomsky is a master at this form of argumentation, and he does it beautifully in Hegemony or Survival when he contrasts the democratic statements of Bush regime officials against their anti-democratic actions. He might also demonstrate how NSA surveillance is not a strange historical aberration but a continuation of past policies, including, most infamously, the FBI’s counter intelligence programme in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s.
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Two encrypted email providers closed down Thursday to avoid being forced to turn over user data to the federal government, The New York Times is reporting.
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Our freedom to share information, speak our minds, come up with new ideas and keep our lives private is being threatened. Governments are continually seeking new ways to monitor what we’re doing, while big businesses are constantly trying to lock us into their products. Bit by bit, our freedoms are being eroded.
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The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.
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Last month, Edward Snowden, a former government employee and contractor, disclosed to newspaper reporters information about US intelligence activities that he obtained during the course of his work. Specifically, he revealed that the NSA engaged in widespread, warrantless surveillance of domestic and international telephone and Internet communications and also engaged in cyber spying on other governments, including allies. The revelations caused a public stir, especially given the questionable constitutionality of the NSA’s domestic surveillance. But far more press, much of it hyperbolic, has focused on Snowden himself. Many officials and observers have called him a traitor while others labeled him a hero and a whistleblower who exposed massive government wrongdoing. The federal government recently brought criminal charges against him for theft of government property and violations of sections 793(d) and 798(a)(3) of the Espionage Act. These crimes carry possible prison sentences of up to thirty years and signal that the government does not view Snowden as a whistleblower. What are the implications of these particular charges for Snowden, especially in light of the First Amendment, which exists largely to protect public criticism of government and serve as a check against government wrongdoing?
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Lyle Denniston looks at a growing debate about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ power to select judges who sit on a top-secret court – a power assigned to him by Congress.
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For the last two months, we’ve all watched the news about the National Security Agency and its friends over at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which approves secret orders on behalf of the NSA and other spy agencies. But more often than not, a lot of these articles take the same basic structure: documents provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden show X, and then privacy advocates and civil libertarians decry X for Y reason.
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Ever since Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s wiretapping to the world, President Obama have been trying to assuage Americans’ fears and apprehensions over domestic spying — and much to no avail. Obama’s latest effort came on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where Obama made clear that America does not have a domestic spying program. Unfortunately, the facts show otherwise.
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At Friday’s news conference, President Obama was asked by Chuck Todd whether the debate that has arisen in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations made Snowden a patriot. Obama disagreed.
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While praising US President Barack Obama’s Friday surveillance reforms as a “victory of sorts for Edward Snowden,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange delivered a written blow to the administration for its “hypocritical” treatment of the subject.
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A canceled summit and the rogue NSA contractor’s asylum had some expecting fireworks at the bilateral talks with Kerry and Hagel. Somehow, it was business as usual.
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Civil Rights
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In a major decision last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the location of your cell phone when you place a call is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guards against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
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In my last blog post I discussed that we have to protect the user’s privacy better by giving the user the choice to decide which data gets submitted to services. In this blog post I want to share some thoughts about the case that the data is submitted and how to protect the user in such a case.
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DRM
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Five publishers have filed objections with the US Department of Justice regarding the DOJ’s choice of punishment in a recent anti-trust ruling against the Cupertino company. The ruling found Apple guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices, forcing customers to pay a higher price. The proposed punishment would require them to cut off their current agreements with the five publishers in question and avoid entering new agreements for five years that could prohibit competitiveness in the market.
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It’s a big day for Apple in court today, as the Cupertino-based company remains entangled in a massive web of litigation that seems to have ensnared the entire tech sector.
First, the company will be squaring off against the Justice Department in a hearing about possible remedies for the company’s practices in developing its e-book business, which a judge recently ruled were in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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For many years, all testing of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in the US was under control of one company: Myriad Genetics of Utah. But many expected that monopoly to be over when the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that Myriad can’t claim patent rights to those genes. In fact, the court ruled, such “isolated” DNA sequences can’t get patents at all—although a lab-made form of the gene called the cDNA version still can.
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Send this to a friend
08.10.13
Posted in News Roundup at 5:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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A new kind of laptop, the SOL, is being designed for the great outdoors and it’s powered by sunlight and it will be running Linux.
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Server
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Chuckle. They must run a lot of GNU/Linux. There’s no way that other OS can be secure with such cuts because of the layers of cruft that M$ imposes. With GNU/Linux otoh, one guy can control an indefinite number of machines with SSH and package managers. Even in my home, I activate one script and it updates all the machines on my LAN in a few seconds.
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IBM is now following in the steps of ARM Holdings and has decided to allow for licensing of their CPU architecture. IBM and a group of other companies wanting a stake in IBM’s POWER architecture have also founded the OpenPOWER Consortium group.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Opsview is a global IT Systems Management software business. Our flagship product, Opsview Enterprise was released in 2009, based on the original Opsview open source project launched in 2003, and is in use in over 35,000 companies in 160 countries.
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Kernel Space
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The Reiser File System (Reiser3) was created by Namesys in 2001 and added to the Linux Kernel in version 2.4.1. Reiser3 was the first Journaling file system included in the Linux Kernel.
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Separate from the important Radeon DPM support in Linux 3.11 that can sharply lower system power usage when using this forthcoming kernel update, there’s been other power-related changes in recent Linux kernel releases.
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Graphics Stack
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The OpenMP 4.0 specification has been unveiled as a major new specification for programming of accelerators, SIMD programming, and better optimization using thread affinity.
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Let’s start from the beginning, because even though Wayland has been in development for over five years there is still a lot of misunderstanding of what it is. Wayland is a display server protocol that is intended to replace the X Window System. We’ve had X for 27 years, and computing has changed a wee bit in that time. Back in the olden days we had text terminals and every little pixel was precious. Now we have great honking graphics cards with more processing power than the servers and workstations of yesteryear, multiple displays, smartphones and tablets, embedded devices, and users who are not going to settle for colorful ANSI displays, but want complex 3D graphics. And why shouldn’t Linux lead the way in graphics rendering? Are we not overdue for holodecks? And who would ever want to leave their holodeck? Though, as figure 1 shows, you can make some cool color images with ANSI.
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Orbital is a plugin/client for Wayland’s Weston compositor that provides a custom shell for the next-generation display server. Orbital is made using Qt 5 and Qt Quick 2.
Giulio Camuffo announced his custom Wayland/Weston shell today on the Wayland development mailing list. He’s been working on this shell for a while that’s written using the Qt 5 tool-kit with Qt Quick 2. It’s now in a comfortable state so he’s decided to publicly announce Orbital.
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The patches published one month ago for Nouveau NVIDIA Fermi Compute Support on the open-source driver have now been committed to master for the next Mesa release. More importantly this is the base work for implementing NVIDIA performance counters.
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Version 7.2.0 of the xf86-video-ati DDX driver was released this morning. While the X.Org drivers aren’t too exciting these days with most of the really great work happening within the DRM or Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, there’s still an interesting number of changes to xf86-video-ati 7.2.0 for Radeon GPU hardware support.
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The set of new patches were written by Intel’s Damien Lespiau and allow for parsing a dark corner of the EDID information for being able to expose the 4K x 2K resolution modes to user-space. These ultra high-resolution modes are supported by the HDMI 1.4 specification.
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Eric Anholt of Intel is currently working on some experimental Mesa code for shipping “Mega drivers”, or building all of the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers together as a single shared object library file. There’s some promise to this mega drivers concept in enhancing performance due to compiler/linker optimizations.
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Marek Olšák, the well known Radeon Gallium3D contributor and AMD’s newest open-source employee, has implemented multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) support for the “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver plus made other changes.
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The X.Org Developers’ Conference is already coming up next month and there’s a lot of interesting topics to be discussed from DRM security to Mesa to reverse-engineering NVIDIA GPUs.
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There doesn’t appear to be much to get excited about right now, but it appears some Google developers working on Chrome/Chromium OS have begun working on some improvements to the Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel graphics drivers.
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For this year’s Google Summer of Code with the X.Org Foundation, three of the developers working on interesting X.Org/Mesa/DRM are on track while one student developer already dropped out.
At this week’s X.Org Board of Directors IRC meeting there was an update on the GSoC projects. The meeting minutes in full can be found via the X.Org Wiki. Of the four projects, three are on track while one of the student developers has already quit/failed.
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Going back to June on Phoronix there have been Ubuntu Mir/XMir performance benchmarks. Up to this point these benchmarks have only been done with Intel and Nouveau graphics drivers, since the AMD Radeon driver has been rather problematic with XMir. Sadly, this still appears to be the case.
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Xubuntu, the Xfce-based flavor of Xubuntu, is presently evaluating the use of Canonical’s Mir display server via the XMir X11 transition layer. For helping in the process and testing, the Ubuntu derivative has made public some Xubuntu XMir images.
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Just days after the exciting news of Coreboot supporting the AMD “Kabini” APU, there’s more good news for this open-source project… There’s now Intel “Haswell” graphics firmware support!
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We now know that the Linux 3.11 kernel has a heck of a lot of AMD Radeon performance potential through the new dynamic power management (DPM) support in its DRM kernel driver, but how’s the Nouveau performance? Here’s some new benchmarks.
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Applications
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Although discs are slowly becoming obsolete and being replaced by simple transfers or downloads over the Internet, there are still plenty of reasons for burning or copying some discs. In some cases, your Internet connection may not be sufficient enough to download the files you want. For example, distributing CDs/DVDs of Linux distributions is easier than telling computer-illiterate people to visit a website, download a large file, and burn it to a disc themselves. In any case, you need a trusty burning utility to do the job, and Brasero and K3b are your top choices.
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Several years back, Songbird was going to be the newest, coolest, most-awesome music player ever to grace the Linux desktop. Then things happened, as they often do, and Linux support for Songbird was discontinued. I’ve been searching for a favorite music player for years, and although plenty of really nice software packages exist, I generally fall back to XMMS for playing music—until now.
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Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Gamers are in for a treat with this week with the new Humble Weekly Bundle offering games from Introversion, including popular simulator Prison Architect.
The new bundle launched today and includes four games from Introversion Games, including hacking game Uplink, real-time strategy game Darwinia and its multiplayer counterpart Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest alongside strategy war game Defcon.
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If you follow our planet, this is no news, but the recent advances in graphics, networking a other stuff from SuperTuxKart are quite nice. This is basically a result of them being accepted to this years Google Summer of Code.
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I’ve often wondered what’s more upsetting; being set on fire only to have the fire put out with buckets of urine, or a new Humble Bundle for Windows only. Well, I’ve yet to be set of fire and put out with a firehose-style golden shower, but regardless of the fact, I’m infinitely disappointed by Windows-only Humble Bundles. However this latest bundle has almost been remedied by Guido Eickmeyer, Creative Director at Deep Silver. Just hours ago, Guido started a popular AMA thread over on Reddit.
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I’ve always loved simulation games for as long as I can remember. They can involve so many different aspects of the topic in question and can keep you entertained for hours. However, a common downside to any great simulation game is the price to purchase it. Thankfully, there are open source equivalents which aim to replace their costly proprietary cousins — examples include FlightGear and LinCity-NG as alternatives to Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series and SimCity games respectively.
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id software lost company president Todd Hollenshead earlier this year, and just after the most recent QuakeCon legendary developer John Carmack has announced his departure
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Something I have been meaning to do an editorial about for a while is game demo’s, spurred on by PuppyGames blog posts on it (here and here) about them not supplying demo’s for any of their games.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Using the openSUSE Build Servive it’s now easy to test the very latest Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 advancements from the openSUSE Linux distribution.
Following in the steps of Project Neon, the initiative for providing daily packages on Kubuntu of KDE Frameworks 5, a similar push is underway in the openSUSE world.
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I know 4.11 is still not released (will release today), but kde master is open.
So I started to add new feature in KDEPIM.
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So while y’alls were frolicking at Akademy (with Dot coverage), I was on vacation. The choice between vacationing with my family or attending Akademy was a tough one: we also spent some time looking into getting the whole family to the conference, but the price tag and “what will the kids do there” tipped the scales. Maybe next year Akademy will be somewhere that fits in my summer vacation and is amenable to cycling.
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We have just released version 0.6.3 of KDE Telepathy, the instant-messaging client for KDE.
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Last week, I presented an idea about indexing messages from webmails in Nepomuk. The summary of this idea is to implement a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome and Konqueror. This extension parses the DOM tree of every page visited by the user that belongs to a webmail. When e-mails are found, they are extracted and stored in a temporary file. Nepomukfileindexer then quicks in and indexes these e-mails in the Nepomuk database.
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Back in May I had to travel to Bariloche, my hometown, due to family issues. While there, I met Javier Barcenas, a local FLOSS advocate and developer.
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Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for five years straight.
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Well I think it’s time for a small update on porting the FolderView applet to QML.
First of all, I’ve dubbed it QuickFolder for now, this is the name under which it exists in the kde-baseapps repo. The reason is that both codebases need to coexist for a while for me to carry over the old (existing) code to the new applet.
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It’s that time of the year again for a new PIM sprint. I’ve been there the last two times now and it’s just one amazing bunch of people coming together and making massive progression in what they like doing most.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The free software world has been at risk of getting left behind. GeoClue, the location framework designed for these environments was in a state of flux for a long time with very little happening to it. But now we have GeoClue2, a rewritten implementation of the original idea.
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After being released as a preview for GNOME 3.8, Photos has seen some progress in the 3.9.x cycle. Some highlights so far:
Flickr support.
The ability to push to digital media renderers (or DMRs) using dLeyna.
A new selection pattern and title bar.
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The MATE Desktop, one of the popular forks of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, is seeking to support the Wayland Display Server as well as systemd — two popular Linux technologies that have only been a focus for GNOME3.
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Vinagre, an open source remote desktop connection and VCN client for the GNOME desktop environment, reached development version 3.9.5 a few days ago.
Vinagre 3.9.5 fixes credential access with libsecret, improves credential description, fixes a logic bug in utils.show_many_errors(), adds the recognize_file() API to VinagreProtocol interface, and uses the new recognize_file() API for parsing files.
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At GUADEC last week besides drafting Wayland plans for GNOME, there was a BoF session for GNOME’s toolkit. Here’s some of the stuff that’s upcoming for the GTK+ 3.10 tool-kit.
For end-users, GTK+ 3.10 is significant in that it should have near-complete HiDPI support — the tool-kit playing nicely with retina-like displays. There’s been a lot of work in recent months by GNOME on their HiDPI support throughout the desktop. The HiDPI blocker right now is just waiting on a new Cairo release.
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We had a GTK+ meeting during the Guadec BoF days. It was a long and good discussion touching on many issues.
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New Releases
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Last week when I wrote about the OpenMandriva Lx Beta delay I was a bit frustrated because I couldn’t find any kind of release schedule for OpenMandriva Lx. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one because a long time contributor asked the technical committee for one. The answer was a bit disappointing I’m sure.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A while ago, I read Ken Stark’s delicious rant because of a kernel regression.
Ah, those regressions can be real bothersome in the world of FLOSS. Even so, I had never experienced one. Therefore, the whole thing remained pretty much an abstraction to me… until two days ago, when I found my original thesis presentation and understood the frustration of those regressions.
Let me explain. When I was a student, computers were not as popular as they are today, let alone laptops. Thus, delivering a presentation meant that you had to borrow somebody else’s laptop.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has announced that it is expanding the reach of its embedded software program through a new partnership with Avnet Embedded, a business group of Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc.
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Red Hat is known to many people as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and it has proven that its Linux-focused strategy is very profitable. But as I noted in a recent post, the cloud beckons for Red Hat. June was a big month for Red Hat in terms of advancing its cloud computing strategy, which the whole company is aligning around as an engine for future growth. The company unveiled the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. It also introduced the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network and Red Hat Certified Solution Marketplace.
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Fedora
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ok so you have a shiny new Fedora 19 installation, you’ve just installed it onto your computer/laptop, what’s next. Ok well here’s what I’ve done.
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Well hi there, strangers. I’m sitting in Robyn’s keynote at Flock 2013, so obviously I need to do something other than listen to what happened to her this one time at band camp (yep, really)! Also, I need to write a blog post so Fedora Badges will pick it up. Fedora Badges is the awesome new gamification thing for Fedora which I told everyone who’d listen I was way too cool to get sucked into, so of course as soon as it went up I started refreshing the leaderboard every three seconds…
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This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 19 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.
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Debian Family
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Two distinguished distributions are celebrating birthdays this week. The openSUSE project celebrates 8 years of open Linux development and distribution. At the same time, Debian is gearing up for their birthday celebration at DebConf13 on August 16. Both projects provide invaluable and incalculable contributions to the Open Software sphere and the world economy.
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Derivatives
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People get tired of hearing me say this, but I’ll say it again anyway: The CrunchBang Forums contain a wealth of information accented by a community of knowledgable and friendly — in equal portions — people volunteering their time to answer questions. The forums and the community are one of the things that make CrunchBang the great distro it is.
Still, this may come as a shock to some, but we don’t have all the answers.
Oh, we might have most of the answers. But from time to time in the CrunchBang Forums, we get questions about software that is not CrunchBang specific. And when answers aren’t quickly forthcoming, sometimes the original poster may become impatient or find that the community is lacking in some way.
Let’s be clear about something: If you’re looking for CrunchBang-specific answers — answers to questions solely about the distro or the way things work in it — those answers are usually quick to be answered, if they haven’t been answered already. In fact, I have seen disagreements crop up about which solution to a question is best, which is somewhat entertaining.
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Ubuntu is no longer the basis of gNewSense – the famous GNU/Linux distribution comprised of entirely free software.
The distro, backed by open-source proponent Richard Stallman and endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, has switched to Debian as the base of its most recent stable release, gNewSense 3.0.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has reached the half-way mark in their campaign to fund the Ubuntu Edge smartphone.
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Canonical needs money to fund the Ubuntu Edge smartphone. Crowdfunding isn’t working. Is it time for Founder Mark Shuttleworth to sell Ubuntu to a big technology company?
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In the last weeks I blogged a couple of times about how we want to get Ubuntu out to more and more users in a much much easier way. It would be great if we could have gotten all images built in the data centre, but unfortunately do redistributability issues (some firmwares, blobs and proprietary kernel modules) not allow us to redistribute them easily.
Another issue were some short-comings in our infrastructure, which have to some degree been fixed already.
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The first big rock is Image Based Upgrades. Today, when we “bless” a new image, one must use a tool on your desktop called “phablet-flash” to update to that new image. After August, the phone will download updates over wireless and install them without requiring a connection to the desktop. As you can see in the blueprint, this requires some deep changes to the way Ubuntu works (as well as to our automated testing) in order to do it as robustly as is necessary for this market (a.k.a. no “dpkg –configure -a”). The disks must be partitioned so that the system is total separate from user data. The server must calculate the binary diff of an update for that partition, and the diff must be applied safely and reliably.
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Since this article was published Canonical has cut the Edge’s price to $695. See details at the end of this piece.
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Canonical has lowered the price of its Ubuntu smartphone to $695 from $775 in a bid to reach its lofty $32 million crowdfunding goal in the next two weeks.
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Canonical has done away with its complicated pricing scheme for the high-end Ubuntu Edge, instead setting the device at a fixed price point of $695 (about £447, AU$762).
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Canoncial has generated plenty of buzz with its $32 million crowdsourcing effort to build 40,000 of its Ubuntu Edge superphones, resulting in an impressive list of nearly 20,000 individual contributors. The problem, though, is campaign has only $8.8 million in the pot and just 14 days remaining.
Canonical remains optimistic that the Edge, a smartphone-PC hybrid that runs both Ubuntu for Desktop and Android, will see the light of day, for two reasons: First, the company has won over its first enterprise backer in financial information and news provider Bloomberg. Second, the company has managed to cut the price on the Edge to $695 a pop.
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Canonical’s Ubuntu Edge croudfunding effort, though in many respects impressive, seems the most paradoxically ill-fated campaign ever: the largest all-or-nothing Indiegogo launch ever attempted, the Edge is somehow smashing records while showing absolutely no sign of reaching its $32 million goal. A limited number of pricy funding tiers probably hurt momentum, as did vague shipping promises. There is some good news for the folks at Canonical, though: Bloomberg LP pledged support yesterday for the Edge at the Enterprise level, equivalent to an $80,000 investment. That may’ve motivated the company to cut unit price to a mere $695 – a significant reduction. Is it already too late for the Edge, though?
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Canadian telecommunications company WeWi will soon be launching a solar-powered notebook called the SOL Laptop. While it’s not the first of its kind, it has at least one impressive feature that makes it one to watch: WeWi claims that the built-in solar panels can charge the laptop in just 2 hours.
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As expected with Canonical’s plans to land the Mir Display Server with XMir in Ubuntu 13.10 where Unity 7 will run atop XMir by default for supported configurations, the various components have now landed in the Ubuntu 13.10 “Saucy” main archive.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Deepin is the leading community distribution from China featuring the Deepin Desktop Environment based on GNOME Shell. Linux Deepin 12.12.1 was announced today as an enhancement (and also a bug-fix) of the previous 12.12 release. New functions include the deepin-notifications plugin for the desktop, where users can check the notifications sent by utilities or the OS. As an important component of the desktop, Deepin System Settings now supports wallpaper selection via the personalization module and automatic login via the accounts configuration module. The Software Center has been upgraded for more convenient software installation/uninstallation. The dmusic-plugin-baidumusic plugin has been developed for better online music experience. Last but not least, the Deepin team has been maintaining a weekly archive on recommended applications. Read the full release announcement (in Chinese) for further information including screenshots.
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Elementary OS “Luna” is probably the most beautiful Linux distribution in existence, and the developers are preparing a new launch, most likely of the final version.
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Lately, there seems to be a lot of fear, doubt and negativity about Xubuntu and Mir. Several news sites have even been releasing news saying that Xubuntu is the first operating system to run Mir. This is both correct and incorrect.
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Scarcely a week after the Intel-backed Minnowboard.org project began shipping its $199 open-hardware single board computer, the AMD-backed GizmoSphere.org project released an unrestricted version of its $189 Gizmo SBC’s schematic and electronics distributor Digi-Key added Wandboard.org’s open, Freescale-based $83-144 boardset to its online catalog.
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My android phone wakes me up with its stock alarm clock into a cold San Francisco summer morning. I lie around a bit, but eventually get up to enjoy yet another day. An hour later, I’m running in my dress shoes, tie waving in the wind like that of an anime superhero schoolboy, towards a light rail train stop. Twenty seconds before I get there, the train leaves, right before an unanticipated 20-minute break in the service. I eat a bagel I don’t want in a cafe nearby to sit there and work while waiting; my day, having barely started, is already ruined.
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We spoke to the creator of Rapiro, the Raspberry Pi robot, about open source, Kickstarter and the future
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Amazon could dive into the video game arena with its own Android-based gaming console, according to the folks at Game Informer.
Citing information from sources with “knowledge of the in-development hardware,” Game Informer said on Thursday that the console could reach consumers by the end of the year, mostly likely by Black Friday. The console would come with its own dedicated controller, say the sources, and would serve as a platform for the digital games already offered by Amazon through its Web site.
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It’s okay to love kernel source – you can admit it. Sony is pretty good to the open source community, and in keeping with that reputation, it has posted the open source files for the Sony Xperia M. Yay.
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Continuing its commitment to open source software, Sony has taken to its developer portal to upload version 14.1.B.0.461 of its upcoming (yes, not even released yet) Sony Xperia Z Ultra. The embracing of the open source community by Sony is very much a welcome habit of theirs, and consequently it’s little wonder that last year they were voted best OEM.
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Android
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One-click login hands over keys to Gmail, Google Drive et al, says researcher
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BlackBerry is sharing its crown jewels – BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) – with non-BlackBerry devices for the first time: and the lucky punters are Samsung fandroids in Africa.
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If your Android smartphone is performing at a grindingly slow pace, it could be due to apps running in the background that are chewing up available memory. Task killers aren’t really sufficient — these background apps don’t stay dead for long. However, Watchdog Task Manager lets you see exactly which apps are gumming up the works, letting you decide whether to kill — or perhaps delete them.
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Android news/rumors: The end of an era, plus giant robots annoyed as LG removes “optimus” title from latest release, Android’s continued domination and why people think it’s doomed, and a Moto X engineer hates back on critics
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You see, there is Google Android, the project that Google builds and shares with its handset partners, then there is the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). The two are not exactly the same. One of them includes proprietary technologies that are not available as open source (guess which one?).
Jean-Baptiste Quéru, the maintainer of AOSP abruptly quit his post this week, throwing into question the viability of Android as an open-source effort.
“There’s no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can’t boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support,” Queru stated in a G+ post.
The challenge that Queru is referring to is the ability of AOSP to boot on the Nexus 4 and 7 devices. Apparently there are some proprietary bits that silicon vendor Qualcomm is not making available as open source, without which AOSP will not boot.
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Taiwanese personal computer maker Acer Inc. said it plans to offer fewer Microsoft Inc. products and more Chromebooks and Android-based mobile devices, after it posted a surprise second-quarter loss on lower sales and rising expenses.
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You can have any kind of flagship phone, so long as it’s 4.7 inches or larger.
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Today in Open Source: Giant Android phones. Plus: Strike Suit Zero released for Linux, and is Apache the most important open source project?
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Google’s maintainer of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP), has quit the project out of being frustrated with the lack of open-source ARM GPU drivers. In particular, Google’s flagship devices not working with the Android open-source project over no vendor-backed open-source graphics drivers.
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A year ago, BusinessWeek published a story called “It’s Official: Google Is Now a Hardware Company.” And since then, Google’s involvement with hardware has been transformative. Chromebooks (portable computers running Chrome OS) are one of the few bright spots in the portable computing market, Google is spreading out with its Motorola Mobility phone strategy, and the company is getting buzz around its new Chromecast dongle for streaming video content to TVs.
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The NVIDIA SHIELD portable gaming device/console was released at the end of July and now NVIDIA has come forward with the source-code to the whole operating system in hopes of encouraging enthusiasts to modify and improve the platform.
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Another round of bug-fixes for the Radeon Dynamic Power Management code has been submitted for the Linux 3.11 kernel.
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Motorola has designed a phone meant to be customized, even to your voice. It’s imperfect, but could return the company to its former glory
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That the Moto X doesn’t feature the absolute fastest mobile processor doesn’t matter much. It’s all about simplicity, comfort, and some forward-thinking features. It’s a friendlier Android phone for people who would typically go for an iPhone.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The new devices run on Atom chips, include customized educational software, and offer a number of learning accessories.
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Asus is responsible for both the original Nexus 7 and the refreshed edition, so it’s clear the Taiwanese manufacturer has a good working relationship with Google. The refreshed Nexus 10 will reportedly be available “in time for the holiday season” through both Google Play store and Best Buy. Although he’s unsure of the exact announce date, Holly tells us that Best Buy is already preparing for the tablet internally.
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Google’s Web Lab exhibition has had a decent run at London’s Science Museum, but all of that web-linked hardware is being packed up for good after the doors are closed this Sunday. Google’s hoping that at least some of it will live on, though, and has teamed up with research and design firm Tellart to open source two of its most popular experiments.
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The disclosures by Edward Snowden will have a huge impact on our society and by that also on free software. I do not think that we can continue as we used to do, but that we have to adjust our software to fit the new reality, to make our software a true opponent to the surveillance state we live in and to return to 1983.
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I started my technology career in the late ’80s working as a bench tech at a small computer repair shop. The first major malware infection I remember was a virus called ‘stoned,’ which spread by sharing floppy disks between computers and replicating itself. It was hidden in the master boot record but not terrible difficult to find and repair. A computer infected by stoned simply displayed the message, “Your computer is now stoned, Legalise (sic) Marijuana.”
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Philosophies on how to approach things in life, for example Open Source Versus Closed, run in cycles. In the 1970s hobbyists would be carefully typing BASIC code from there enthusiast magazine. Commodore, Apple or the highest podge of C/PM machines.
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Events
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What’s been your summer blockbuster favorite? Wolverine? Lone Ranger? Pacific Rim?
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Our favorite summer blockbuster comes out September 16 with an exclusive showing only in New Orleans: LinuxCon and CloudOpen North America taking place September 16-18, 2013 at the Hyatt New Orleans.
This is the largest gathering of Linux and cloud professionals in North America. Deeply technical content has been produced in partnership with the Linux Plumbers Conference to extend the opportunities for learning and collaborating unlike ever before. We hope you will join us.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Single sign-on (SSO) mechanisms offer the promise of users having a single credential (the sign-on) in order to log into multiple sites and services. When it comes to the Web, there are multiple sources of identity to power SSO, and open-source browser vendor Mozilla wants to be one of them.
Mozilla launched its BrowserID effort in 2011 and renamed the consumer-facing technology bits Persona in 2012. Just to confuse us all, the core specification behind Persona is still known as BrowserID.
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Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 23.0 today with several new features to the popular open-source cross-platform web-browser.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The Palm pioneer has turned to neuroscience and big data to create a path to truly intelligent machines — a path open to the community’s contributions
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Last week, I covered some comments from a couple of tech industry heavyweights having to do with the OpenStack cloud computing platform. Specifically, former Microsoftie and noted tech blogger Robert Scoble put up a Google+ post saying that OpenStack would be sidetracked by any attempt to build in API compatibility with Amazon Web Services (AWS). And, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that his company’s strategy is to “support OpenStack” despite the fact that the platform is “immature.”
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Databases
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Keeping the DB alive outside Larry’s grasp? Sounds good to Choc Factory
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CMS
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Drupal 7.23, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.23 release notes for a full listing.
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Late Thursday afternoon, premier hosting provider and domain registrar ITX Design announced the upcoming launch of complimentary phpBB open source forum software with all new hosting and VPS accounts. The Virginia based company now guarantees the service where the customer won’t ever need to purchase an additional server or pay for web hosting.
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Education
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This year Arianna Huffington delivered the commencement address at Smith College and dared the female graduates (it’s still a female college) to change how society has been defining success for women from money and power to wonder, wisdom, giving back, and community.
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Business
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BSD
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Issue_contents
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who will guard the guards themselves)?
Apache THRIFT: A much needed tutorial
A closer look at the changes in PC-BSD/TrueOS 9.2 – Part 1 – ZFS Boot Environments
An email gateway with FreeBSD to prevent malware and undesirable messages
The Service Spawner
FreeBSD Programming Primer – Part 7
PKGNG: The future of packages on FreeBSD and PC-BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Make sure you have rtmpdump installed and enter this command into your terminal emulator:
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Licensing
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The world of open source licenses is really quite interesting if you give it a chance. The premise of taking the restrictive presumption of copyright law and using it to do the opposite, that is, grant a broad range of rights creates some interesting license language, to say the least. Although legal concerns around may be new to many people still, some of the licenses have storied pasts. Here’s a sampler of open source license trivia to memorize for your next local pub quiz night.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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In February, CivSource reported on an effort by engineer Philippe Plagnol to open up the tracking and supply chain data contained in the barcodes on consumer products. Since then, Product Open Data (POD) has garnered the attention of the French government, private sector partners and the GS1, the organization responsible for creating and housing data on each unique barcode. In this interview, we talk to Dr. Mark Harrison, Director of the Auto-ID Lab at the University of Cambridge, who works with the GS1 and recently started looking at projects like POD in an effort to bring more openness to GS1.
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Open Access/Content
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The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge.
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Open Hardware
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Arduino-powered satellites arrive at International Space Station on Saturday
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Open-source PCs like the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard are finding interesting uses
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Single board or “open-source” PCs have become a hot market, with the Raspberry Pi selling in the millions and competitors getting in on the act, including Intel’s recently announced MinnowBoard (shown above).
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The video above shows how this laptop with a very modular design can be quickly disassembled without the use of tools. If you’ve ever taken apart a laptop, you know the pain and frustration that comes from trying to find and keep track of the nigh infinite number and variety of screws that hold these things together. As these students demonstrate, it just does not have to be this way. Interestingly, there may not be much of a need for a modular designed laptop as long as the components themselves were sufficiently modular. This is the kind of thing I’ve come to expect to be uploaded to Thingiverse.
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Programming
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The truth is, kids can’t use general purpose computers, and neither can most of the adults I know. There’s a narrow range of individuals whom, at school, I consider technically savvy. These are roughly the thirty to fifty year-olds that have owned a computer for much of their adult lives. There are of course exceptions amongst the staff and students. There are always one or two kids in every cohort that have already picked up programming or web development or can strip a computer down to the bare bones, replace a motherboard, and reinstall an operating system. There are usually a couple of tech-savvy teachers outside the age range I’ve stated, often from the Maths and Science departments who are only ever defeated by their school laptops because they don’t have administrator privileges, but these individuals are rare.
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Science
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It took an out-of-this-world arrival to get that perfect chemical combination for water to fill our planet
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Health/Nutrition
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When the Obama administration announced July 2 that it would give a breather to employers affected by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), angry unionists noticed a pattern.
Even before this delay, “every corporate interest that’s asked for regulatory relief has gotten it,” said Mark Dudzic, chair of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer, “but the concerns of union plans have been overridden.”
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The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) will next week meet in Ethiopia to discuss strategies for resistance against genetically modified (GM) seeds.
AFSA is a Pan African platform comprising networks and farmer organisations working in Africa including the African Biodiversity network, Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage, Comparing and Supporting Endogenous Development Africa, Friends of the Earth- Africa, Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee and Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association.
The rest are Eastern and Southern African Small Scale Farmers Forum, La Via Campesina Africa, World Neighbours, Network of Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa, Community Knowledge Systems, Plate forme Sous Régionale des Organisations Paysannes d’Afrique Centrale and African Centre for Biosafety.
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Security
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When Twitter rolled out two-factor authentication back in May, it hinted that the SMS authentication would be merely a first step in a more robust security solution. Today, WIRED got a better look at the company’s just-announced new system that relies on application based authentication–which means it can provide a complete end to end security without relying on third parties or codes sent via SMS.
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Lavabit offered Snowden—and other customers—512-bit security on stored e-mails.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Judicial Watch has filed a law suit against the CIA, claiming that during his speech at a June 2011 awards ceremony the former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed “top secret” information in the presence of Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal. The conservative watchdog group seeks to investigate whether the White House put the national security at risk only to provide Hollywood directors with facts to make a “pro-Obama” film.
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But if you go and read the Jane’s report you might wonder what exactly is going on here. The report clearly puts almost no stock in the idea that this facility has anything to with a desire to launch missiles armed with nuclear warheads–that would make sense only to “those who believe Iran’s rulers are messianic fanatics who are intent on destroying Israel as soon as possible with no regard for the consequences.”
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In fewer than two weeks, Hellfire missiles launched by U.S. drones have killed at least 31 people in Yemen. At least 14 of the victims were believed by President Obama — the launcher-in-chief — to be al-Qaeda militants.
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A senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday praised the Obama administration’s policy of using of drones in the evolving war on terrorism, saying he has no problem with the precedent being set by the legally controversial policy and would not be bothered if other world powers — specifically Russia — began using drones to kill terrorists.
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An Israeli drone strike killed five suspected Islamic militants and destroyed a rocket launcher in Egypt’s largely lawless Sinai Peninsula on Friday, two senior Egyptian security officials said, describing a rare Israeli operation carried out in its Arab neighbor’s territory.
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A report from CNN’s Jake Tapper has reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far as changing the names of CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.
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The second-in-command of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) says that the toppling of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria is the largest threat to United States national security and may help al-Qaeda acquire chemical weapons.
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The online magazine speculates that the mom of two will be returning to the small screen as the lead of a new CIA drama written by Alexi Hawley, the supervising producer of Fox’s “The Following.”
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Heigl would reportedly take on the role of an adviser or communications liaison for the United States president, while the storylines would focus around CIA operations around the world.
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Baer said at the beginning of the interview he arrived in Sarajevo by helicopter with three other agents on January 12 1991. He said that their jobs had been to keep an eye on the supposed Serbian terrorists, suspected of preparing an attack on Sarajevo.
He said that they had information about a group called “Serbian Supreme” and their plans to attack key buildings in Sarajevo with the aim to make Bosnia leave Yugoslavia.
However, he said, such group has never existed and he and other agents were tricked by their central command. They were actually given the task to warn people and raise panic amongst the politicians in Bosnia. They, as he said, basically just filled their heads with the idea that Serbs will attack. Eventually they realized they were spreading stories and fear about a group that did not exist.
The operation was called “Istina” (The Truth) which is exactly what it had not been, he said. He was given another task and left Sarajevo after two weeks for Slovenia on another job. The operation in Bosnia continued for another month or two.
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A jury has cleared the city of Portland, Oregon and two police officers of using excessive force during an Occupy protest in November 2011, when a demonstrator was struck in the throat with a baton and sprayed with pepper spray into her open mouth.
The case of Elizabeth Nichols came to an end on Friday when a lawsuit against the city and police was thrown out of court. Nichols took part in an Occupy Portland protest several years ago and ended up becoming one of the highest profile instances of alleged police brutality against the Occupy movement.
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Tomas Garcia was a father of seven who would have turned 50 this December. He was a husband, father, brother, and community leader, serving as an auxiliar and on his community’s Indigenous Council. On Monday, July 15, his life was brutally taken away by the Honduran military when a soldier shot and killed him at close range in broad daylight in front of 200-300 people. He did not have a gun, he did not hurt anyone. His crime? Opposing the construction of a hydroelectric dam being constructed in his Indigenous Lenca community’s territory against their will, in violation of ILO Convention 169 and the Honduran government’s promises to consult Indigenous communities about projects in their territory. Why Tomas? He was one of the first to arrive, leading the delegation that had come to deliver a message to the companies constructing the dam at their installations in Rio Blanco. A soldier fired at him not once, not twice, at least three times from only 6 or so feet away, according to eyewitnesses.
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Some of the people who were most concerned about Internet privacy, and were using the Tor anonymous Internet service to protect it, may have been the most exposed.
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Transparency Reporting
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So the potentially most damaging part of Manning’s disclosures was that the war kills civilians–and that U.S. enemies could use that fact to recruit others.
If that’s the standard– that the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda–then shouldn’t someone be talking to George W. Bush about ordering the invasion that caused all the killing? Of course not–the only person facing punishment is the person who thought the rest of the world should know about it.
We–and certainly many others–have made the point that the prosecution of Manning should be treated seriously by journalists and press freedom advocates– especially now that the government is laying out its case about what it considers to be the harm done by WikiLeaks.
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It should go without saying that Putin’s treatment of whistleblowers and journalists in his own country is deplorable, but that does not delegitimize Snowden’s asylum claim in any way. Right now, he is walking around a free man, able to contribute to the ongoing debate in the US if he so wishes. That almost certainly “feels safer” than being locked in a cage, held incommunicado, possibly surrounded by violent criminals, and facing life in prison, as he would be if he came home.
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http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/07/31/ripples-of-the-bradley-manning-verdict/the-bradley-manning-prosecution-sends-an-antidemocratic-message
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The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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“Citizen Koch,” a highly regarded documentary about the billionaire Koch brothers and the growing influence of money in politics after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, suffered a major setback earlier this year when PBS pulled the film and the $150,000 in funding that had been promised. Scrambling to find a way to distribute their film, Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin turned to Kickstarter in a highly successful move that recently surpassed the funds they had previously expected to receive from public television.
As of Thursday, the “Citizen Koch” crowdfunding effort had attracted around $170,000 from nearly 3,400 donors. The average donation was just over $50, with contributions ranging from $1 to $5,000. The campaign — which catapulted past its initial $75,000 goal after just three days last month — has quickly become one of Kickstarter’s most successful.
Producers say the funds raised on Kickstarter will be used to pay for the final sound mix, the film’s score and graphics, color correction, creating mastered elements for distribution, licensing archival footage and music rights and other post-production and distribution costs.
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Look at it any way you want, and if you’re not a booster of fossil fuels on this overheating planet of ours, it doesn’t look good. Hardly a month passes, it seems, without news about the development of some previously unimaginable way to extract fossil fuels from some thoroughly unexpected place. The latest bit of “good” news: the Japanese government’s announcement that natural gas has been successfully extracted from undersea methane hydrates. (Yippee!) Natural gas is gleefully touted as the “clean” fossil-fuel path to a green future, but evidence is mounting that the newest process for producing it also leaks unexpected amounts of methane, a devastating greenhouse gas. The U.S. cheers and is cheered because the amount of carbon dioxide it is putting into the atmosphere is actually falling. Then Duncan Clark at the British Guardian does the figures and discovers that “there has been no decline in the amount of carbon the U.S. is taking out of the ground. In fact, the trend is upwards. The latest year for which full data is available — 2011 — is the highest level on record.” It’s just that some of it (coal, in particular) was exported abroad to be burned elsewhere.
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About 50,000 liters of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Thailand on July 27 from a pipeline operated by PTT Global Chemical Plc. The oil spill reached Samet island off Rayong province which is a popular tourist destination.
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Oil companies have quietly brought the controversial practice of fracking to the coast of California, causing some state legislators to wig out. They’re now asking for a federal probe of an issue that hasn’t gotten the same amount of attention as the fracking that takes place on land.
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Finance
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Wall Street’s biggest banks are currently under the gun for their massive role in global commodities markets. But what many don’t realize is the vast expansion of that role was, in large part, an unintended consequence of the chaos of the financial crisis.
Should we be shocked that the ramifications of the financial crises are still reverberating years later with unexpected repercussions? Not in the slightest.
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Where there is no social program, there’s always a violence program. For the Clinton/Gore administration welfare reform and expansion of the police state were not only means to trump the Republicans; they were also essential to economic policy. Intense competition for jobs at the lowest rungs would depress wages, pit poor and working-class people against each other and, where workfare recipients displace municipal workers, weaken labor unions. The spectre and reality of incarceration would have the traditional effect of suppressing the dangerous classes, at a time when the wage gap between the rich and the poor grew wider than at any time in recent history.
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A federal judge has for the first time ruled that Bitcoin is a legitimate currency, opening up the possibility for the digital crypto-cash to soon be regulated by governmental overseers.
United States Magistrate Judge Amos Mazzant for the Eastern District of Texas ruled Tuesday that the US Securities and Exchange Commission can proceed with a lawsuit against the operator of a Bitcoin-based hedge fund because, despite existing only on the digital realm, “Bitcoin is a currency or form of money.”
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Australia has twice the minimum wage as the US and Big Macs cost roughly the same.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The top lobbying issue for both Apple and Amazon is reforming the tax code. Unlike Apple and Facebook, however, Amazon is playing a major role in lobbying for vendor collection of Internet sales taxes. Apple’s second and third major focus areas are telecommunications and copyright, patent, and trademark – likely because its lawsuit with Samsung, with which Google is also involved.
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Censorship
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A technical decision made by Sky in implementing website blocking has lead to the blocking of news site TorrentFreak
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Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky’s blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers.
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Autumn Manning, wife of one of the survivors, Staff Sgt. Shawn Manning, is claiming via Twitter that the Defense Department is “slapping victims with gag orders” along the lines of this: Don’t talk to the press following testimony in the Hasan trial.
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Privacy
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The arbitrary resetting of people’s ‘privacy settings’ is a behaviour one might expect of Facebook, not the NHS.
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During a Friday afternoon press conference, President Barack Obama said that he would work with Congress to declassify more information about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) secret surveillance programs.
At the same time, Obama denied that it was disclosures by Edward Snowden that moved this issue to the forefront. The reforms were already in the works, he insisted; Snowden’s revelations were made in “the most sensationalized manner possible” and unduly scared people.
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The Administration released a White Paper on Friday that summarized its claimed legal basis for the bulk collection of telephony metadata, also known as the Associational Tracking Program under section 215 of the Patriot Act, codified as 50 U.S.C. section 1861. While we’ll certainly be saying more about this analysis in the future, the paper makes one central point clear:
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The NSA’s metadata program was put into place with virtually no public debate, a worrisome precedent made worse by erecting unnecessary barriers to public understanding via denials and misleading statements from senior administration officials.
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The National Security Agency created a “secret backdoor” so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens’ confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
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The National Security Agency can search for U.S. citizens’ names and other information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according a document Edward Snowden leaked to The Guardian.
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As President Obama was laying out his “plan” in response to the public’s concerns over NSA spying, both the DOJ and the NSA released some documents defending the various programs. I would imagine it will surprise none of you that these documents are chock full of hilarious and misleading claims. Let’s highlight a few, starting with the NSA’s document, which is shorter, more general and covers all the various programs more broadly. It’s also a complete joke. We’ll get to the DOJ one in another post.
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The NSA has absolutely no credibility on this subject, and the claims in this document are simply laughable.
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President Obama announced a series of new reforms to increase public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial Internet and telephone surveillance program. The press conference (live at whitehouse.gov/live) is still on-going. Here are the 4 reforms he’s proposed.
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Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Friday said the Intelligence Committee will hold a series of hearings in the fall to examine National Security Agency surveillance programs.
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President Barack Obama says US “can and must be more transparent” about surveillance programmes and promised to work with Congress to put constraints on government spying.
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For more than a year, two US senators on the intelligence committee have fought a lonely, unsuccessful battle to prevent the National Security Agency from combing through its vast email and phone records databases for Americans – a battle waged almost entirely in the shadows.
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The global backlash against the National Security Agency’s cyber spying picked up a notch on Friday as Germany’s leading telecom company announced that all email flowing among three of the nation’s email services will remain on German servers at all times. The move reflects powerful differences in the way that Americans and Europeans view privacy—and just happens to coincide quite nicely with the commercial interests of European Internet companies, who have yet to achieve anything close to the scale of Google Inc. or Amazon.com Inc.
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Material provided to the Guardian by US whistleblower Edward Snowden and released last week includes the fact that the US National Security Agency (NSA) paid the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at least £100 million over the past three years.
In 2009 the NSA gave GCHQ £22.9 million, increasing that figure to £39.9 million the following year—including £4 million for GCHQ’s work for NATO forces in Afghanistan.
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Newly leaked National Security Agency documents published by the Guardian reveal that the NSA can scour vast databases of personal information by searching for the names, email addresses and other identifiers of United States citizens.
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Canadians’ personal data could end up in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies if American telecom giant Verizon is allowed to operate here, warns the union representing communications workers.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada charged Friday that Verizon’s recently revealed co-operation with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in its clandestine collection of telephone records of millions of U.S. customers could extend north under a federal policy that eases the sector’s foreign ownership restrictions.
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A website launched to allow the public to thank Prism whistleblower Edward Snowden for his actions gained 10,000 posts within just a few hours of going live.
The website was launched by digital rights group Fight for the Future on 7 August, shortly before it was announced President Obama would cancel a meeting with President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s approval of Snowden’s asylum. Thousands of messages poured in in those first few hours, reaching 10,000 by the time a statement was released from the White House over the Putin meeting.
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On Monday the foreign ministers of Mercosur, including Venezuela’s Elias Jaua, met with the general secretary of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, in New York, to express their rejection of “global spying” by the United States.
The Mercosur ministers from Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, were referring to information about the US government’s PRISM global spying program revealed by Edward Snowden in June.
The US government’s spying “absolutely violates international law, countries’ sovereignty, and the fundamental human rights of the citizens of the world,” Jaua said.
He also told Ban that Mercosur countries are concerned about the “attempt to put pressure and conditions on countries who have offered asylum to Mr Snowden”.
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The White House Press Corps just completely botched the one opportunity we had to learn details about the National Security Agency’s spying program, and the rationale for sweeping government surveillance. During the hour-long press conference President Obama held specifically to answer questions about the NSA, not a single journalist asked him details about the NSA. As a result, we learned precisely zero information from something slated to be critically informative.
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President to work with Congress to reform NSA’s Fisa court and Patriot Act but made clear that mass surveillance would continue
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Thursday saw yet another revelation in the ongoing exposure of a cluster of unconstitutional surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies of the US government. In a front page article, theNew York Times revealed that vast quantities of emails sent and received by Americans communicating with people abroad are swept up, “cloned,” and combed through by NSA analysts, on the basis that the messages contain certain words or phrases deemed suspicious by the government.
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Earlier today, President Obama held a press conference to address the growing public concern over the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. We are glad to see that the Administration has been forced to address the matter publicly as a result of the sustained public pressure from concerned voters as well as the ongoing press coverage of this issue. Obama acknowledged that Americans were uncomfortable with the surveillance that has been leaked to the media (and noted that he would be as well, if he weren’t in the government). He made four commitments to transparency and reform during the press conference, and also published a whitepaper describing the legal interpretation of the PATRIOT Act that is used to attempt to justify bulk surveillance.
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In the wake of the shutdown of two secure e-mail providers in the United States, three major German e-mail providers have banded together to say that they’re stepping forward to fill the gap. There’s just one problem: the three companies only provide security for e-mail in transit (in the form of SMTP TLS) and not actual secure data storage.
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‘Relevance’ cited in surveillance of Americans’ calls
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The leaks continue to pour forth revealing the totalized surveillance of American communications by the National Security Agency. Now, it appears that the communications of individual U.S. citizens can be specifically targeted, not just swept up in the spy dragnet. On Friday, the Guardian published the latest revelation, based on information gleaned by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, namely that a legal loophole enables the NSA to search through the vast hoards of data it keeps on communications within and going out of the U.S., and can search for U.S. citizens’ emails and phone calls. The findings stand at odds with claims in recent weeks by government officials that Americans are not targeted by the NSA’s vast surveillance programs.
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Prior to President Obama’s press conference on potential surveillance reform today, two important stories were published showing National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance has gone farther than government officials have admitted publicly. Now that the President has promised transparency on NSA surveillance, it’s time for the NSA to come completely clean to the American public. They can start by explaining—in detail—how and why they are obtaining the content of communications transiting telecom networks, which then go into the databases behind NSA programs.
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Today the Guardian reported that a change to section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) appears set to allow for the searching of communication information of United States citizens. Previously, section 702 was restricted to communications of foreign individuals who were located outside of the United States at the, to quote the Guardian, “point of collection.”
United States citizens were outside the scope of section 702 authorization. However, that appears now to be potentially changed.
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The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
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This week’s DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our justice system
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According to German news magazine Der Spiegel, the American National Security Agency placed monitoring of the European Union as one of the top priorities of the organization’s activities. The report is based on documents that were allegedly leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
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The ability for US intelligence agencies to access internet data was used as a bargaining tool by a Telecom-owned company trying to keep down the cost of the undersea cable from New Zealand.
Lawyers acting for Southern Cross Cable quoted a former CIA and NSA director who urged the Senate to “exploit” access to data for an intelligence edge.
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The founder of the WikiLeaks website said on Saturday that President Obama’s announcement of changes to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program this week vindicated Edward Snowden’s release of information about the program.
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Google and Microsoft have slammed a proposed bill that would compel United States providers to assist New Zealand agencies with interception as potentially harmful to the country’s IT industry and incompatible with international privacy laws.
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Government employees editorializing entries isn’t uncommon. In fact, there’s an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to the subject. But editorializing by editors using government IP addresses rarely goes unnoticed. Now, whoever did this may feel Snowden is a traitor but the verdict is still out (quite literally) on that. He’s been charged with espionage but until there’s actual court proceedings, he’s nothing more than a “dissident” (although that term has its problems as well), albeit one the government would like to have back in the US as soon as possible.
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We are writing to you as free speech and media freedom organisations from around the world to express our strong concern over the response of the US government to the actions of whistleblower Edward Snowden. We urge you to take immediate action to protect whistleblowers and journalists. – See more at: http://www.article19.org/resources.php/resource/37194/en/letter-to-obama-to-stop-the-prosecution-of-snowden#sthash.d0xebm8X.dpuf
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We are concerned that surveillance conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) under Section 702 of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and other legal authorities is inconsistent with international human rights norms and U.S. international commitments, as embodied in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)[1] and resolution 20/8 of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) [2]. We are particularly concerned about the human rights and civil liberties of non-U.S. persons, as defined under FISA, and urge you to give full consideration to the rights of non-U.S. persons in your findings and recommendations. Human rights are universal and must be guaranteed to all persons. We strongly advocate that current and future legal provisions and practices take this principle into consideration.
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Clear restrictions on electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency is the best way to avoid economic damage to U.S. tech companies tainted by revelations of massive data collection on U.S. and foreign citizens, experts say.
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Less than 24 hours after researchers disclosed a new attack that can pluck secrets from webpages protected by the widely used HTTPS encryption scheme, the US Department of Homeland Security is advising website operators to investigate whether they’re susceptible.
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Civil Rights
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Due process is law our authorities must obey in all circumstances. The constitution doesn’t call for any exceptions.
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A New York Times journalist whose claim he shouldn’t have to testify in a leak prosecution was rejected, 2-1, last month by a federal appeals court panel asked Friday that the full bench of that court rehear the case.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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DRM
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Hours after the Department of Justice and 33 U.S. states proposed a set of remedies for Apple following its July loss in the e-books price-fixing case, the company came back with its own set of terms and called the government’s proposals vague, overreaching, and unwarranted.
[...]
A federal judge last month ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws, following a trial in the Southern District of New York. Judge Denise Cote said the Justice Department proved that publishers conspired together to eliminate price competition for e-books, and that Apple played a central role in that conspiracy. Apple has said it plans to appeal the decision.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Public Patent Foundation today asked the Supreme Court to rule part of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 unconstitutional. Specifically, PUBPAT filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court in Public Patent Foundation v McNeil-PPC, a case brought by PUBPAT in June 2009 against the manufacturer of Tylenol for falsely marking and advertising its acetaminophen products as patented, challenging the provision of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, passed in September 2011, that retroactively eliminated PUBPAT’s standing to bring the case against McNeil. PUBPAT asked the Supreme Court to answer the following question, “Does the retroactive application of the AIA’s changes to the false marking statute to this case violate Petitioner’s Due Process under the Fifth Amendment?”
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Copyrights
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Today The Pirate Bay celebrates its 10th anniversary. Founded in 2003 by a collective of hackers and activists, the small Swedish BitTorrent tracker grew to become a global icon for online piracy. We’ll take a look at how it all came to be, from a tiny community running on a 1.3GHz machine with 256MB RAM, to Hollywood’s arch rival serving millions of users from a cloud-hosted hydra.
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There has been lots of talk about copyright reform in Washington over the past few months, as evidenced by the announcement from the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee that that panel would undertake a comprehensive review of the copyright law. The first hearing for that review was held back in May. As Mike Masnick from TechDirt noted, the Registrar of Copyrights is supportive of the effort but “still focused on bad ideas.” More recently, the Department of Commerce Task Force on Internet policy issued a “Green Paper” last month that helps us see what is right and what is wrong with the current attention in D.C. on copyright reform.
The Task Force recommended three broad categories of reform: updating the balance of rights and exceptions, better enforcement of rights on the Internet, and improving the Internet as a marketplace for IP through licensing. These last two are straight out of the legacy entertainment industries’ wish list, of course, and they would do nothing at all to better realize the fundamental purpose of copyright to promote creativity and innovation. As for the first, it all depends, of course, on where one thinks the balance has gone wrong. The Task Force includes as a priority the reform of the library exception in section 108, which is a favorite goal of the Copyright Office right now, but it is not at all likely that anything the Office cooks up would be better than leaving the current 108 alone. The Green Paper also seeks “input” about digital first sale and remixes; note that input is a much weaker commitment than the task Force is willing to make to such things as online enforcement, reform of 108, or — another industry favorite — the extension of the public performance right for sound recordings.
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In response to growing fears of government spying, yesterday Kim Dotcom announced that parts of his company will relocate to Iceland if that means keeping customers’ data secure. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom says that continued broad surveillance will have serious financial consequences. “Mass surveillance and copyright extremism will cost the US economy more than any terrorist attack or piracy,” he predicts.
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High-IP industries are far smaller than those that have low copyright protection.
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Records at the Illinois Secretary of State show that Prenda Law was “voluntarily dissolved” on July 26. The move isn’t surprising and is largely a formality. A key lawyer for the embattled “porn troll” had already said it was “winding down” its operations.
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08.09.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Applications
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Games
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Born Ready Games is happy to announce that both Mac and Linux versions of Strike Suit Zero are available to download through Steam today. Joining them will be the Raptor Strike Suit and Heroes of the Fleet DLC.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today we are surrounded by ‘smart’ devices all around us – smartphones, tablets, TVs, PCs and many more. These devices naturally don’t interact with each other. There are some device specific apps developed by some companies but those work within the device spectrum of that company, for example Samsung All Share comes only for Samsung Android devices and work only with Samsung smart TVs.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS KDE FullMonty 2013.08 (32/64 bit) is now available for download.
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The Porteus Community is pleased to announce the distribution release of Porteus 2.1 (Standard Desktop Edition), as well as Porteus Kiosk Edition 2.1! Major additions since our 2.0 release include restructuring our layout to have standalone iso’s for five desktop environments (KDE4, RazorQT, Mate, Xfce and LXDE) and adding optional prepackaged modules for Google-Chrome, Opera, Libreoffice, Abiword, print/scan support and development software, all available through a new download interface that allows users to build and download customized ISO’s at http://build.porteus.org.
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Debian Family
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Debian GNU/Linux celebrates its 20th birthday anniversary this month. I have been using Debian GNU/Linux only a few years and I regret not having known Debian earlier. The growth, vitality, and quality of the project has been amazing. With Debian GNU/Linux I have been able to do a lot with a tiny investment in IT. It is a force-multiplier for good Free Software.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Over $9 million has now been pledged to the Ubuntu Edge campaign on IndieGoGo, helping it smash yet another crowd-funding record.
This figure, whilst $23 million short of the required $32 million goal, makes Ubuntu Edge the second largest crowd-funding campaign in history. It shunts the Ouya games console, which raised $8.5 million over a 30 day period, into 3rd place.
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The goal is to raise $32 million in 30 days to build 40,000 Ubuntu Edge next-generation smartphones.
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Canonical dropped the Indiegogo price for its Ubuntu Edge phone from $775 to $695. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project launched an Ubuntu App Showdown contest for the best Ubuntu for Phones app that can be developed between now and Sept. 15.
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Flavours and Variants
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It would appear that either yesterday, or the day before yesterday, a mysterious countdown was added to the elementary OS website. Or rather, the whole website was replaced by a countdown. So far, I haven’t found any definite indications of what exactly we’re counting down to.
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Phones
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Android
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Intel announced two educational tablets that run Android 4.x on Atom Z24xx processors. The 10-inch and 7-inch Intel Education Tablets feature Intel educational software, dual cameras, temperature probes, magnification lenses, and stylus options.
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During the second quarter of 2013, shipments of Android tablets doubled those of iOS, with 62.6 percent worldwide market share, according to IDC, while DigiTimes expects Android tablets to out-ship iOS models for the first time in the second half of the year. Meanwhile, IDC reports that Android smartphone sales rose to 79.3 percent of the worldwide market, or six times the Q2 share of iOS.
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Web Browsers
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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The Open Government Partnership summit in London is gaining momentum, as evidenced by the growing engagement from civil society organisations. The OGP is reaching an important milestone, with the closure of its first cycle of country commitments and independent assessments.
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On the scale of things too horrible to contemplate, “document-altering scanner” is right up there with “flesh-eating bacteria.” This week Xerox (XRX) acknowledged that some of its scanners can, with certain settings, change the numbers in scanned documents. On Wednesday it announced a fix for the problem, which a spokesman called “really an anomaly.”
The problem came to light when David Kriesel, a German computer scientist, scanned a construction plan on a Xerox machine and noticed that the document that came out wasn’t identical to the one that went in: Numbers for some room measurements had changed. Kriesel alerted Xerox, wrote about the problem on his blog and began to investigate how widespread the problem is.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Oh, the serious news! I read it with ever-fresh incredulity. It’s written for gamers. It reduces us to gamers as it updates us on the latest bends and twists in the geopolitical scene. We’re still playing War on Terror, the aim of which is to kill as many insurgents as possible; when they’re all dead, we win (apparently). The trick is to avoid inflaming the locals, who then transition out of passive irrelevance and join the insurgency. They get inflamed when we kill civilians, such as their children.
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Military and intelligence stories have been all over the news recently. Be it indiscriminate eavesdropping programs, WMD infrastructure, or our impending doom at the hands of terrorists if we vote “yes”, there is a common denominator in the statements of the high heid yins: these are issue for the big boys, the role set out for the rest of us is to cower in fear and not to hurt our wee brains trying to understand. In the independence debate, we are warned that an independent Scotland is going to be overrun by terrorists, disastrously cyber-attacked, or run out of money trying to prevent these disasters from happening. The catalyst of the recent wave of scare stories is a report by a bunch of military and intelligence insiders, the crowd treated in the mainstream media as holding an exclusive grasp of the serious issue of our national security. But this deference is exactly the type of elitist approach that led us into the intelligence SNAFU we are in at the moment – with the agencies at odds with the democratic process and public control. The independence debate is a chance for us to crack open the debate on intelligence and the military, and imagine what a security apparatus actually subservient to democracy might look like.
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Transparency Reporting
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Americans are becoming more concerned that government ‘anti-terror’ programmes are actually restricting civil liberties.
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Finance
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With a Eurozone record of 27 percent of Greeks unemployed, people are taking a pro-active approach to the crisis. Activists from the ‘We Won’t Pay’ movement, which boasts 10,000 members, are illegally reconnecting power to hundreds of homes.
Tough austerity measures have left many people in Greece unable to pay their electricity bills. The ‘We Don’t Pay’ movement which has over 10,000 members helps many of those by illegally reconnecting power to their homes, despite legal action against them.
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Greek youth unemployment has soared to a record 64.9pc as the country’s downward spiral continues almost unchecked.
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Increasing wealth creates positive feedback, much like a hurricane moving over warm water. A more powerful 1% allows them to command the political and economic high ground of America, so that they can gain further wealth — and shape a New America more to their liking. This process has run for several generations; now the results are plain to see — for all that wish to look. Today we have first of three tales of New America.
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In his career as an investigative journalist, economist, and bestselling author – Vultures’ Picnic, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – Greg Palast has not been afraid to tackle some of the most powerful names in politics and finance. From uncovering Katherine Harris’ purge of African-American voters from Florida’s voter rolls in the year 2000 to revealing the truth behind the “assistance” provided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to ailing economies, Palast has not held back in revealing the corruption and criminal actions of the wealthy and powerful. In a recent interview on Dialogos Radio, Palast turned his attention to Greece and to the austerity policies that have been imposed on the country by the IMF, the European Union, and the European Central Bank.
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Censorship
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Over the past month copyright holders and Google have clashed over infringing search results and how they should be dealt with. Due to its smaller market share Microsoft’s Bing has rarely been mentioned, but the company informs TorrentFreak that they also remove hundreds of thousands of infringing URLs each month. Interestingly enough, Microsoft itself is one of the most active senders of DMCA notices to Bing.
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As the crackdown on copyright infringement in Sweden continues, the local Pirate Party has today held up a mirror to the politicians who support the tough enforcement regime. Marking the ten-year anniversary of The Pirate Bay, the Pirate Party have reported Sweden’s IT Minister to the police after she was spotted infringing copyright online on a number of occasions.
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Privacy
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The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become “complicit in crimes against the American people.”
Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance.
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Silent Circle, a company that specializes in encrypted communications, said it is preemptively turning off its Silent Mail product. It’s doing so despite no urging at all from the government—no subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else, company co-founder Jon Callas wrote in a blog post today. “We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.”
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A pro-privacy email service long used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden abruptly shut down today, blaming a secret U.S. court battle it has been fighting for six weeks — one that it seems to be losing so far.
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An email provider reportedly used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shut down on Thursday, citing an ongoing court battle that it could not discuss.
Lavabit, which launched in 2004, specialized in providing a high-security email service that employed advanced encryption. It was designed to thwart the kind of surveillance techniques that Snowden revealed in June were used by the U.S. government.
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An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowden was shut down abruptly on Thursday amid a legal fight that appeared to involve US government attempts to win access to customer information.
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“We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now,” Silent Circle wrote in a blog post on Friday in reference to the closure by Lavabit.
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On Wednesday, the New York Police Department agreed to expunge more than a half million names from its stop-and-frisk database – another blow to the embattled crime-fighting tactic that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has hailed as a key policy in the city’s plunging crime rate.
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That doesn’t mean they don’t target us, of course, it just means they need to find a loophole. Today we learned one of those loopholes is to collect literally all emails and other text-based messages that involve a foreigner, figuring that if pressed they can insist the foreigner, not the Americans were the “target.”
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The US National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the US spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.
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A report from CNN’s Jake Tapper has reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far as changing the names of CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.
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So, why did you join the CIA? To be mobster Henry Hill, shoved into an Agency witness protection program? Except, unlike Hill, it isn’t you who’s being protected. It’s the president, higher-ups, and the Agency itself. You — you’re more a prisoner than a pampered witness. Remember the 60s’ cult classic Brit TV series, The Prisoner? Once you’re in the Agency, you’re never out.
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Lots of people are asking good questions about the veracity of the Obama administration’s claims regarding this latest terrorist attack that they foiled by intercepting electronic communications between Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of core al Qaeda, and Nasir al Wuhayshi, a high level operative in the Yemeni affiliate.
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The leaders of the top three U.S. intelligence agencies made an unusual joint public appearance Thursday to make a pitch for companies to cooperate more with the government in cybersecurity efforts, and defended the work their agencies do amid controversy over vast data mining programs that critics say invade Americans’ privacy.
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When Edward Snowden emailed journalists and activists in July to invite them to a briefing at the Moscow airport during his long stay there, he used the email account “edsnowden@lavabit.com” according to one of the invitees. Texas-based Lavabit came into being in 2004 as an alternative to Google’s Gmail, as an email provider that wouldn’t scan users’ email for keywords. Being identified as the provider of choice for the country’s most famous NSA whistleblower led to a flurry of attention for Lavabit and its encrypted email services, from journalists, and also, apparently, from government investigators. Lavabit founder Ladar Levison announced Thursday that he’s shutting down the company rather than cooperating with a government investigation (presumably into Snowden).
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Lavabit, a US company offering extremely secure and privacy protecting email service, has suddenly shut down. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reportedly used the service to securely send emails without government interception.
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ISPs and email hosting providers need to be willing to and plan for the need to work with government officials.
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How the NSA went from off-the-shelf to a homegrown “Google for packets.”
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An important New York Times investigation from today reporting that the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country,” coupled with leaked documents published by the Guardian, seriously calls into question the accuracy of crucial statements made by government officials about NSA surveillance.
The government has previously tried to reassure the public about its use of FISA Amendments Act Section 702 surveillance practices, emphasizing that, under Section 702, the government may not “intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.” Indeed, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Feinstein, in a letter to constituents who wrote to her expressing concern about the NSA’s spying program, said this: “[T]he government cannot listen to an American’s telephone calls or read their emails without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause.”
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NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander might have had a difficult time recruiting hackers at the Def Con and Black Hat security conferences, but he might not need to recruit again anytime soon. Speaking at a cybersecurity conference in New York City — where he sat down with the heads of the FBI and CIA — he told an audience that he’d like to replace the vast majority of his employees and contractors with machines. No joke.
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Silicon Valley companies concerned at effect on business as revelations over US government spying spread more widely
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Germany’s leading telecoms operator will channel email traffic exclusively through its domestic servers in response to public outrage over U.S. spy programs accessing citizens’ private messages, Deutsche Telekom said on Friday.
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The U.S. government needs only three degrees of separation to look at Kevin Bacon’s phone records.
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5. The NSA assumes you’re foreign until proven otherwise.
The NSA tries to determine whether communication is foreign through strategies like matching known phone numbers against an internal database. Whenever an attempt to determine one way or another fails, the program assumes the person in question is foreign and continues unabated.
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United States President Barack Obama insists his government isn’t in the business of domestic surveillance, but one of his former advisers says that’s contrary to the truth.
“Everybody knows I love this president, but this is ridiculous,” former-Special Adviser for Green Jobs Van Jones said Wednesday on CNN. “First of all, we do have a domestic spying program, and what we need to be able to do is figure out how to balance these things, not pretend like there’s no balancing to be done.”
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A new study suggests that the direct losses to US tech companies from people and companies fleeing to other services (often overseas) is likely to be between $22 billion and $35 billion over just the next three years. Germany is already looking at pushing for rules in the EU that would effectively ban Europeans from using services from US companies that participate in NSA surveillance programs (which is a bit hypocritical since it appears many EU governments are involved in similar, or even worse, surveillance efforts).
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“President Obama is certainly being creative with the truth,” said Yasha Heidari, managing partner in the Heidari Power Law Group. Allowing the NSA’s activities to take place calls into question the president’s adherence to basic principles of the American Constitution, he suggested. “As a former Constitutional law professor, it is hard to believe that he does not know this.”
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On Thursday, Obama met behind closed doors at the White House with tech company executives and privacy groups to discuss his administration’s system of surveillance. The context was radically different from the last conversation he participated in on the subject, his chat with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show. But both conversations reinforce the ongoing problem with that surveillance: informed, public debate on the subject appears to be impossible.
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An open, public, informed conversation on surveillance has been the president’s stated goal since shortly after the Edward Snowden leaks began. How authentic that desire is isn’t clear. But how possible it is isn’t either.
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For German companies, industrial espionage has historically been a problem related to the east, with Russia and China topping the list of security concerns year in and year out. But not so much anymore.
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Lavabit and Silent Circle’s secure email services have been shut down as part of a generational-scale anti-surveillance pushback, but only US and UK agencies are under the microscope. Why not Australia?
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Smartphone-monitoring bins in London track places of work, past behavior, and more.
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The White House hosted a closed-door meeting with a number of tech luminaries and executives on Thursday to talk about privacy issues. Apple CEO Tim Cook, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, and Vint Cerf (the co-inventor of TCP/IP) were reported to be in attendance, according to Politico.
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The Jewish Daily Forward noted in May that – even including the people killed in the Boston bombing – you are more likely to be killed by a toddler than a terrorist. And see these statistics from CNN.
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Civil Rights
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Agencies of the federal government are sharing the massive database of personal information being obtained by surveillance, and police are being taught how to hide the details from judges and lawyers, a Reuters report reveals.
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I can see this stipulation working against whoever the government feels is worthy of the title “journalist.” News develops. It seldom has a distinct starting point. Of course, if someone is a journalist, it stands to reason that they’re always “planning” to publish their findings. But that might be a lot harder to prove when the government starts slinging subpoenas.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Public Knowledge has a couple of pieces up on the fight between CBS and Time Warner Cable over TWC’s payment for the right to rebroadcast broadcasts and then charge the public link here and link here. CBS has already been amply rewarded through advertising on its over the air broadcasts free use of the public airwaves. But in the current fight, it wants still more money. Congress set this up in 1992 legislation which allowed the networks to charge for retransmission permission of its broadcasts.
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08.08.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors – and to a lesser extent MIPS chips – and having lost the game console business to AMD, IBM had to do something dramatic to expand the addressable market for its Power processors. And that something, which Big Blue has just rolled out, is called the OpenPower Consortium. which takes a few pages from the ARM Holdings playbook to breathe some new life into the Power architecture.
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This is getting long, so I’ll close with an anecdote. My Dad visited earlier this month. I gave him a Samsung Chromebook as a loaner for his visit and he’s been using it happily. He logged into his Gmail account in Chrome and his bookmarks and other Chrome settings just showed up. Dad’s laptop back home is about 5 years old, so we stopped by the Apple store. I was going to outfit him with a top-of-the-line MacBook; since he goes for years between upgrades, I wanted him to have a laptop that would last as long as possible. But after noticing the price, he balked. “Matt, we can buy ten Chromebooks for that much money,” he told me. We’re still discussing it, but the $250 Samsung Chromebook does everything he needs. I think more and more people will discover that’s true for them as well. I’ve been surprised how well the Chromebook Pixel works for me.
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Server
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The OU began using Red Hat Linux back in 2002, when the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) became one of the first in the nation to open a Pentium 4 Xeon cluster, which ran the community version of Red Hat Linux, according to a recent story in FutureGov.
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Earlier this week, Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan announced plansto form the OpenPOWER Consortium – “an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture.” According to the release, the Consortium will collaborate on both hardware and software to build out new hyperscale and cloud data centers.
The release is light on details, which makes sense given they are announcing their intent to form a consortium, but I did find the news interesting on a number of fronts:
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Analyst Roger Kay said that since “IBM was pretty much the only company using Power technology, it is looking for a way to expand the market for that technology.” He added that Intel is really the only other company supporting its own architecture entirely. “it is very difficult and expensive for a single company to maintain an architecture,” he said.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linux kernel developers have selected a new long-term kernel that could serve as the basis for enterprise Linux distributions as well as consumer electronics devices.
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On the latest Linux 3.10 stable kernel we have taken ten common Linux file-systems and generated an interesting performance comparisons. The Linux file-systems being tested in this article include XFS, Btrfs, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, JFS, F2FS, and ZFS.
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Graphics Stack
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So I finally get working 3D acceleration and suspend/resume and get rid of artifacts in Fedora 19 on my HP Pavilion g6 laptop (AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics) with the 13.6 beta version of the AMD Catalyst driver for Linux.
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Applications
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RIP Google Reader: October 7, 2005 – July 1, 2013. Yes, it’s official, Google Reader is dead. One of the best content aggregators (feed readers) on the web, that too by one of the best companies on the web, has just been discontinued. Google, noticing that Google Reader’s usage was declining, announced on March 13, 2013 that it was going to discontinue the product by July 2013. This led to a huge discontent among many Google Reader users who thought that the change was completely unnecessary and that Google was pulling the plug on a very important product. In fact, more than 100,000 people signed a petition on change.org opposing the axing of Reader. Needless to say, saying goodbye to Google Reader was one of the hardest things ever for techies who preferred all their news in one place.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I graduated University with a diploma in mechanical engineering, after that I switched the field and worked most of the time as a computer engineer, that was my day job. Graphic design was something I did in my spare time and was something I learned by myself, by reading, experimenting, being a part on FOSS projects and so on. And I had a few successes, all while using almost exclusively FOSS software.
Now when I find myself as a freelancer, it made sense to complete my professional background by receiving certification as a graphic designer. How to do that? By taking a recognized professional training for adults. Following is the experience of a FOSS guy going trough a traditional graphic design training.
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Python bytecode, meet the language behind the language! It’s a language like any other, with its own syntax, semantics, design patterns and pitfalls. It’s even better than Python, because it’s executed directly, not compiled to some intermediate easy-enough-to-interpret language. So if those bytecode compilation times are bugging you, you know what to do.
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Wine or Emulation
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GNULinux users are already familiar with Wine which allows them to run supported Windows application on their GNULinux systems. Wines is however not an answer as at times it doesn’t support the latest versions of the apps. Now GNULinux users can also run Apple Mac apps on their systems.
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Linux users who want to run Windows applications without switching operating systems have been able to do so for years with Wine, software that lets apps designed for Windows run on Unix-like systems.
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Games
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While the Humble Bundle team has always been a big supporter of gaming on Linux, there are No Games for Linux in the current Humble Bundle and Weekly Sale.
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Broken Rules’ new aerial exploration game, Secrets of Rætikon, will start trekking through the low-poly forest on PC, Mac and Linux this year. Its previous game, Chasing Aurora, was a Wii U exclusive, but its first title, And Yet It Moves, launched on PC, Mac, Linux, WiiWare and iOS. Broken Rules says Secrets of Rætikon may “possibly” come to consoles, too.
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Secrets of Rætikon, the aerial exploration game from Chasing Aurora developers, Broken Rules Games, will launch on Windows PC, Mac and Linux, the Vienna-based studio announced today.
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Independent game developer Reptile Games is pleased to announce their game, Megabyte Punch is currently available to the public via the Humble Bundle Store, Desura and Gamersgate. Described best as a mash-up of SSB, Megaman and Custom Robo. Megabyte Punch is an electro fighting/beat ‘em up game in which players can build and customize their own player. The game is currently on sale for $11.99 (US), 20% off its original price of $14.99 for PC (Windows), Mac and Linux. Megabyte Punch fans can also purchase a special edition of the game that comes with the original Soundtrack with 27 tracks, HD Wallpapers, and extra custom levels for $20.00.
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Unvanquished, a free, open-source first-person shooter combining real-time strategy elements with a futuristic and sci-fi setting, has just received a substantial update.
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Harebrained Schemes have unveiled plans for their support of Shadowrun Returns, now that the game is out in the wild and being played by millions.
The first patch has now been released (get the change notes here) and more changes are on the way, including Linux support and localisation for Spanish, Italian, German, and French.
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Development company Leadwerks had started a Kickstarter campaign some time ago that aimed to improve game development environments on computers running on Linux. The company’s initial aim of $20,000 has been far surpassed, with 787 backers having funded the project for a total of $42,358.
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Where are my Linux gaming guys? I got some good news for you. Very, very good news! Prepare to play six new games on your Linux box in the coming months. Now, I present you the games. Read below. http://store.steampowered.com/
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I also reviewed AudioCdCollection bugs. It is hard to keep track on fixed bugs, because I can’t close fixed one in bugzilla. So I’ll list bugs here and shall update this post:
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After solving bugs that occurred mainly during the rendering of overlays having a GeoDataLatLonBox with a rotation parameter other than 0, Marble is now capable of displaying ground overlays by simply opening a KML file referencing one.
However, the rotation angle was not the only problem source, as issues also appeared when displaying overlays that extended over the antimeridian. In fact, this turned out to be the most annoying corner case, as dealing with it meant treating multiple situations separately and led to ugly code.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Wifislax is a Slackware-based Linux distribution designed for wireless hacking and forensics. It’s not on the list of Pentesting, digital forensics, and hacking distributions that I published last week, but with this article, it just got added.
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New Releases
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This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.13 – Core Update 71. This update comes with some new features and minor bug fixes.
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Red Hat Family
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Editor’s note: In this series of blog posts, Tim Burke has been reviewing Red Hat’s journey from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the newly announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. This is Tim’s third post in the four-part series. The first two can be found here and here.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYS: RHT) , the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced continued global expansion with new and expanded facilities around the world. Red Hat also announced that its facilities in Raleigh, N.C., Westford, Mass., and Beijing are expected to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, highlighting the company’s commitment to building environmentally sound offices. Today, Red Hat has more than 80 offices worldwide with more than 5,700 employees.
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If you think Red Hat is just about Linux, then you’re mistaken. Red Hat is quite active locally sponsoring various activities and educational programs trying to give back to the community which has embraced it so enthusiastically. Most recently Red Hat employees built a 10-foot lantern for charity during CANstruction, a local event held to benefit food banks.
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Congratulations to the Gluster Community! In addition to shipping GlusterFS 3.4, the latest release of the open source, scale-out storage system, the Gluster Community has significantly increased its number of projects and contributing developers in just three short months. Since May 2013, the Gluster Community has grown from seven projects for the GlusterFS distribution to more than 30 incubating open software-defined storage projects for big data, demonstrating nearly 300 percent growth in the number of developers.
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GlusterFS, Red Hat’s (RHT) open source software-defined storage solution for Big Data and the cloud, continues to gain momentum. This week, Red Hat announced that the Gluster Community, a consortium of organizations interested in the storage technology, has nearly tripled in size since its launch back in June. Plus, the company unveiled a version 3.4 of GlusterFS.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonial/Ubuntu
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When a new Ubuntu launch date approaches, Canonical developers like to start shaking things up. This time is the turn of Ubuntu for PowerPC.
Canonical devs have observed that the PowerPC version of Ubuntu hadn’t been built in a while, mostly due to failures in particular subcomponents of the Unity stack.
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Forget nitpicking about certain points Hall makes that are well off-base — Ubuntu/Canonical’s lack of contributions back to the community is widely documented, and if someone brought Cadillac blueprints to the Yugo factory, the Yugo folks would probably laugh themselves into a change of underwear before asking, “Do you realize how much it would cost to retool our factory — any factory — to make a car for which the factory was not designed?”
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Canadian-based WeWi Telecommunications Inc. has created an Ubuntu-based laptop that harnesses solar energy from the sun for power. The Sol claims to last for up to 10 hours via the internal battery, can run directly off solar energy and can be fully charged via solar power in just two hours.
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Laptop battery life is something that we all can’t seem to be happy with. No matter how long the battery is able to last, there are always times when we curse into the wind when we get that dreaded battery warning while on the road. However, a new Ubuntu laptop looks to solve those problems by coming with a solar panel attached to keep the battery juiced up without a power cord.
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Former Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth is not deterred by the prospect of his ambitious Indiegogo campaign failing to meet its goal. In many ways, the project has already succeeded.
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SOL is for when you need to be “digitally empowered on the top of a mountain or in the middle of the desert” according to the David-Attenborough-inspired promo video.
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The Edge, a smartphone that runs a mobile edition of the popular desktop OS Ubuntu, will only get made if would-be users pledge $32 million via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. With a strict time limit of 30 days, this ambitious campaign needs to average more than $1 million per day, however the first half of that period has seen great initial momentum slow down to a crawl. In its 15 days on Indigegogo, the Edge project has attracted $8.3 million in pledges, leaving it nearly $24 million short.
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ne of the most interesting aspects of the Ubuntu Edge is that it will run both Linux and Android, instead of solely running Linux like you would expect it to. To start, people running the phone in Android mode will access Ubuntu through the Ubuntu for Android app; further down the line, Canonical will push out a native desktop version of Ubuntu for the Edge.
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and friends have been working to bring the open source operating system to smartphones and tablets. And last month they introduced a side-project, a phone called the Ubuntu Edge which would dual boot Android and Ubuntu and work both as a phone and a desktop computer (when docked to a mouse, keyboard, and monitor).
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On August 6, Canonical published the usual top 10 app downloads chart, this time for July 2013, extracted straight from the Ubuntu Software Center.
Guess what? Steam is still the undefeated king of the top 10 free apps chart from the Ubuntu Software Center, which tells us that many Ubuntu users are hard core gamers.
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UberStudent bundles several learning platforms not found in typical Linux distros. Plus, each application category in the menu has a sub-category of related menus. For instance, there are WebApps, Documentation and Resources. Remember, this is a specially designed distro for those transitioning to Linux. So everything is configured to work out of the box.
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Just a few days ago, Unity 8 became available for Ubuntu 13.10. However, it is just an Alpha release and it’s not coming to the ‘stable city’ until Ubuntu 14.xx release.
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On 28-29 June, the eighth Open Source China – Open Source World Summit, sponsored by China OSS Promotion Union (COPU), occurred in Beijing at Beihang University1.
UbuntuKylin was the talk of the conference. The UbuntuKylin project is a collaborative effort between CSIP,2 Canonical and NUDT.3 Initially released in April 2013, UbuntuKylin is an official Ubuntu flavour that will follow the Ubuntu six-monthly release cycle.
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Back in June one of the links I posted was for a HowTo to use the Music Player Daemon (MPD) for enjoying the music files on your computer without the overhead required by Amarok, Exaile and the such. While I didn’t use it at first I have come to love Sonata as my primary audio player. It’s lightweight, loads fast, lets me search through my entire library, even though it’s on two different partitions, and I can search by the artist rather than the location if I want to. There’s even an Info panel that can show you track and album info, as well as the lyrics.
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To say that Larry “the Free Software Guy” Cafiero criticizes Ubuntu and Canonical is like calling a hurricane breezy. A journalist in his work and a blogger in his spare time, Cafiero frequently shows himself to be harder hitting and more to the point than most free software writers. Recently, however, he has found a way to highlight his criticism while encouraging critics and supporters alike to donate to a cause in which both can believe.
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Bloomberg LP, a revered US-based financial information & news service, has pledged a record $80,000 to the Ubuntu Edge campaign on IndieGoGo.
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Canonical have, once again, lowered the price of the Ubuntu Edge super-phone – but this time they say it’ll be sticking.
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For most of us, an off-the-shelf laptop is sufficient for our needs, where power outlets and WiFi are easy to come by, and a dry and clean environment is the norm.
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The Ubuntu Edge campaign received today a hearty donation of $80,000 from Bloomberg, a US-based financial information and news service. The donation took Canonical’s funds collection to a figure in excess of 8.5 million dollars. As huge as it may sound, the amount of collected funds is just about 25% of the target $32 million that Canonical aims to raise by 22nd August. The campaign seems to be going well, and it looks like Canonical will eventually be able to put a smile on the faces of thousands of funders, who generously pledged their money, by handing them their very own Ubuntu Edge. Many open source commentators are seeing Bloomberg’s move as first of major corporate backings for Canonical’s ambitious project. OMG Ubuntu said in their coverage of this story, “This donation gives the campaign more than money – it gives it a shot of credibility…”
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You might recall Ubuntu’s App Showdown last year. It was a competition for people to make apps for Ubuntu. The developer of last year’s winning application, Lightread, received a System76 laptop and Nokia 9 smartphone (which the second and third place developers also got). Back then, around a 130 applications were submitted.
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Canonical’s recent Indiegogo campaign to fund the development of an Ubuntu-based smartphone got off to a great start as it managed to raise $3.45 million from donors within the first 24 hours. Since then, however, progress has slowed to a snail’s pace and it looks unlikely that the project will meet its goal of $32 million.
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Bloomberg has pledged $80,000 (over £53,000) towards the Ubuntu Edge dual OS smartphone crowdfunding campaign, though the funding round may still ultimately fail with no phones ever being made.
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If you’re one of those folks who loves the great outdoors, and who needs to take a laptop with you, then you’ll dig the SOL from WeWi. SOL is a solar powered laptop that is built to withstand everything nature can throw at it.
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Canonical announced that its Ubuntu Edge superphone has a permanent (until the end of its fundraising campaign) price tag of $695. “No limited quantities, no more price changes,” reads a post. “You wanted a more affordable Edge, and now you’ve got it.”
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Canonical’s Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux has proper support for handling switching to virtual terminals.
Up to now Mir really hasn’t worked in combination with the common Linux VT switching through Ctrl + Alt + Fn keys, but now as of this morning the support is fresh in Mir’s Bazaar repository.
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Flavours and Variants
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With there being experimental XMir-based Xubuntu 13.10 images available for the Xfce desktop spin and a request going out for testing, I ran some Phoronix performance tests to compare the XMir performance penalty for 2D and 3D workloads.
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I realize that I haven’t posted anything in the last 2.5 weeks. That’s because in that time I got quite busy with a combination of UROP work, video making for the MIT-K12 project, and studying for the General and Physics GREs. Given that I will be taking the General GRE in just over a week, and given that I will be going home for vacation shortly thereafter, I won’t be able to post much after this for this month aside from a probable post reflecting on the summer. That said, it is a Sunday as I write this, and I figured I could use a break from the studying. So to do that, I’m reviewing Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” KDE and Xfce.
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A few months ago, I had a Linux first — I reached the end-of-support of a distro. I never thought of myself as a distro hopper, especially with my main laptop, but I guess I hop around enough to have never made it to the end-of-support.
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gNewSense is the GNU/Linux distribution which is used by none other than Richard Stallman himself. It’s one of those distributions which fully adhered to the philosophies of free software.
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/li>
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Shortly after the release of Pear OS 8 Alpha 2, David Tavares was proud to announce that a new welcome screen would be available in the upcoming Pear OS 8 Linux operating system.
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Easy set-up SD card for novice users now offered with any new Raspberry Pi purchase for $5 on an 8 GB SD card
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Pwnie Express has opened pre-orders on a Linux-based penetration testing device that supports 4G out-of-band SSH access. The Pwn Plug R2 runs the Kali Linux-based Pwnix distribution on a 1.2GHz Marvell Armada 370 SoC, and offers dual gigabit Ethernet ports, high-gain WiFi and Bluetooth, and a variety of one-click pen-testing tricks, like running the device as an Evil AP.
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Avnet has unveiled a smaller, lower cost follow-on to its community backed ARM+FPGA based ZedBoard. The $199 Linux-ready MicroZed board is built with a Xilinx Zynq-7010 SoC, and can be used as either a single-board computer (SBC) or as a computer-on-module (COM) feeding 100 programmable GPIO signals into a carrier board.
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RFEL has unveiled board-level versions of its HALO video processing technology, which runs Linux on a Xylinx Zynq ARM+FPGA system-on-chip. Previously introduced as a ruggedized subsystem aimed at military intelligence applications, such as UAVs, the new HALO boards provide embeddable versions of RFEL’s sophisticated image stabilization and fusion engines, which can form composite images by merging visible and IR data.
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Since Linux.com last surveyed the community-backed open source board scene in June 2012, some projects have faded, but a number of new boards have popped up to take their place. In fact, most of our top 10 Linux or Android-ready open source single board computers (SBCs) have shipped in the last few months.
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STMicroelectronics has released ready-to-use software drivers for communication with Linux systems.
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Advantech announced a tiny module based on the COM Express Mini form-factor and built around an Intel 1.86GHz dual-core Atom N2800 processor. The business-card sized SOM-7565 A2 supports up to 4GB of RAM and 8GB of flash, offers a wide range of I/O, expands with three PCIe lanes, consumes 8 to 9.5 Watts, and supports -40 to 85°C operation with its optional heatsink.
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National Instruments (NI) announced a redesigned version of its CompactRIO controller that runs a new NI Linux Real-Time OS on the Xilinx ARM+FPGA hybrid Zynq-7020 system-on-chip. The NI cRIO-9068 controller is fully compatible with the NI LabVIEW development environment, as well as more than 100 I/O modules available for the CompactRIO.
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Micromax, a provider of industrial electronic products and automation solutions for 45 years, announces the Artila Electronics Matrix-516, the new generation of its ARM-based box computers. Artila’s Matrix-516 industrial box computer is a small form-factor, Linux-ready computing platform that offers reliable, 24/7 unattended control at low-power consumption levels.
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Amazon has begun accepting web apps and mobile-optimized websites for sale in its Amazon Appstore for Kindle and Android devices, allowing developers to market their HTML-based wares to mobile users in over 200 countries.
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Phones
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Android
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If you haven’t been following the saga of the Moto X, the short version is that it’s one of the first post-Google acquisition products from the company that gave us the Star Tac and the RAZR. Besides carrying the expectations of a market that needs to see something compelling from Motorola because it’s been a while, the X is also the focal point for analysts seeking an answer to one simple question: why did Google pay over twelve billion dollars for the company? Given the input the folks from Mountain View have had into the product, it’s been assumed that the Moto X would, if not answer that question outright, at least provide a hint.
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LG has announces its G2 phone without the Optimus branding, marking its commitment to high end Android smartphones. The phone will be available across the globe through more than 130 carriers, which includes the all four major US carriers.
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I can’t hear Linus Torvalds saying “Qualcomm, k You” and flipping a finger at the camera. If reports are true Qualcomm may very much need it.
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In a recent career shift, I went from an employer who provided me an iPhone to one who provides me with an Android (Galaxy S4 to be specific). Although I was happy to move to a Linux-based handset, I was concerned about replacing the “Find My iPhone” capability that Apple provides. Not only does my family use it to keep track of each other, but we also relied on it when a phone was misplaced. Does the Google Play store offer anything comparable? Um, yes.
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A feature that allows Android users to authenticate themselves on Google websites without having to enter their account password can be abused by rogue apps to give attackers access to Google accounts, a security researcher showed Saturday at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas.
The feature is called “weblogin” and works by generating a unique token that can be used to directly authenticate users on Google websites using the accounts they have already configured on their devices.
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The Android 4.3 Jelly Bean is already out and everyone is now looking forward to Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie. Though there is no official confirmation from Google about the new name of this OS, on the basis of the alphabetical pattern of the previous Android code names, the tech industry is speculating the name to be ‘Key Lime Pie’.
Starting from the 1.5 version, Google has been naming its Android versions in an alphabetical order. Starting from Cupcake to Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean. Hence the Key Lime Pie, which starts with letter K is obviously the next. Also in the last Google’s I/O we saw the name in a teaser that Google created for the developers.
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Intel subsidiary Wind River announced a collaboration with Chinese embedded software company PATEO on an Android-based automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. PATEO is using Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Android to enable an Android IVI system to play music and videos from iPhones, iPads, and iPods.
The Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Android was announced in May, and with a very specific goal: The software enables a car’s infotainment head unit to be used for viewing and playing content streamed from late-model iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The Connectivity Solution Accelerator makes the car’s IVI head unit act like an accessory to the iOS device. With the iOS device docked into the car’s infotainment system, the head unit can play music and videos and the car’s steering wheel can be used as a remote control.
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If you are trying to lose a few kilos, dieting and exercising are what you need to do. However, while it seems to be simple, you may dont have any idea about what foods to eat, what exercises to do and you also lose the motivation and determination easily. So here are 5 Android apps that can give you some help to make your fat loss journey easier and more convenient.
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Google upgraded its Nexus 7 tablet with better hardware and also used it to introduce Android 4.3 to the world. I already have Nexus 7 (2012), Nexus 10 and Nexus 4 which all got the 4.3 upgrade. But among all these devices Nexus 7 is the most loved one due to the perfect size – ebook reading (the ones I own and not locked into Amazon Kindle), playing games and watching movies is quit pleasant. Since I already have retina-beating Nexus 10 there was not much incentive for me to go for Nexus 7, but there was a remote possibility of getting it for my wife.
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Google may develop the Android software that runs on millions of phones and tablets. But the company also releases the source code for most new builds of Android once it’s ready for public consumption — and at that point outside developers start ripping it apart to see what makes it tick, often building custom versions of Android based on that source code.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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When the XO-1 Laptop first came out in 2006, I was in awe of the hardware innovations. From bunny ears for better WiFi to a hardened swivel-screen top, to its low power consumption, OLPC had one innovation after another.
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Today in Open Source: Android tablets beating Apple’s iPad? Plus: Mozilla Firefox 23 released, and reviews of Linux Mint 15 KDE and Xfce
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Programmers and Wall Street haters alike may join together to support a convicted computer programmer from Goldman Sachs after reading the full-throated defense he receives at Vanity Fair by noted financial journalist Michael Lewis.
[...]
During the last six weeks of his employment, Aleynikov emailed himself four times the source code he was working with. The files contained open source code, code that the programmer had tweaked and Goldman Sachs proprietary coding. The government claims the programmer sent himself 32 megabytes of code, but it was essentially the same 8 megabytes of code sent four times over. Goldman Sachs’ entire system contains more than one gigabyte of code—so what the Russian took was minuscule in comparison to the whole.
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One of the long-running jokes in the free software world is that this year will finally be the year of open source on the desktop – just like it was last year, and the year before that. Thanks to the astounding rise of Android, people now realise that the desktop is last decade’s platform, and that mobile – smartphones and tablets – are the future. But I’d argue that there is something even more important these, and that is the widespread deployment of open source in China.
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I often wonder about the motivations of others involved with the open source community, as I did last month. Linux.com reposted an article by Jeremy Kahn titled Open source as a civic duty that answers the question in the best way possible. Open source is not about you, it’s about us, all of us.
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Open source software is now a common component in most organizations’ IT infrastructure, particularly at the server OS layer where Linux has made significant inroads. Now open source software is becoming more common in other data center realms such as storage, and is poised for significant growth.
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NEWS ANALYSIS: The Flex Framework for rich Internet application development continues its evolution beyond Adobe’s confines as adoption and interest grows.
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Colosa, which develops the ProcessMaker Open Source Process Management (BPM) and Workflow Suite, has announced a channel partnership with OSSCube aimed at integrating Colosa’s Business BPM platform into enterprise application software environments.
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Selena Deckelmann, a data architect and contributor to PostgreSQL, gave a keynote speech at the Computer Science Teachers Association conference this year called, What open source communities can do for teachers. At the end she encouraged the audience (of teachers) to connect with free and open source developers in their communities to work with them to schedule 15-20 minute talks about their work students.
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Google, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan today announced plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium — an open development alliance based on IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale and cloud data centers.
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Back in the mists of time – I’m talking about 2000 here – when free software was still viewed by many as a rather exotic idea, I published a book detailing its history up to that point. Naturally, I wrote about Apache (the Web server, not the foundation) there, since even in those early days it was already the sectoral leader. As I pointed out:
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This Thursday we will post my interview with Marcin Jakubowski. Marcin is a physicist and technologist who became a farmer. After learning the economics of small farming in rural Missouri, Marcin started Open Source Ecology (OSE) to apply open source techniques to small farm and enterprise hardware. His vision of 50 open source blueprints is called the Global Village Construction Set – radically lowering the cost of machines and tools that ensure the success of small farms and communities.
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Events
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This week, the corporate and legislator members of the American Legislative Exchange Council are meeting at the swank Palmer House hotel in Chicago to celebrate the organization’s 40th anniversary, be educated in corporate sponsored workshops and adopt legislative priorities for the coming year. Here is what is on the agenda for ALEC’s 40th — notably, some of the workshops carry a $40,000 pricetag for corporate sponsors.
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In the wake of PRISM and other spying programs by the US and UK governments, companies and organizations will now be shy of using proprietary cloud as it will give the US government direct access to their sensitive data.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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When the Chrome web browser appeared from Google it was notable for two reasons: the rate of development and the speed of the browser. Chrome continues to see regular releases that push forward with new/better functionality as well as continuing to get faster. It is one of, if not the fastest browser available at the moment.
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There is quite a brouhaha developing over how the Google Chrome browser treats passwords, due to the fact that anyone with access to a Chrome user’s computer can find all stored passwords very easily. The Chrome security team is defending the practice, but if you are a Chrome user, you should take a look at what the issue is.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla adds new social-sharing features, issues 13 security advisories and deploys a mixed-content security capability to limit the risk of mixing unencrypted data with secured content.
The open-source Mozilla Foundation is out today with its Firefox 23 Web browser for multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Android devices. The new release comes just six weeks after the last major Firefox release, and brings a number of feature and security updates to the browser.
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It’s finally up for grabs! After about one and a half months since its last stable release, Firefox is out in its new avatar, version 23. FF 23 brings in a whole lot of changes, apart from new logo; not precisely a new logo, but a retouched one (last change was made in FF 3.5). Among a myriad of changes are—Social share functionality, Network Monitor (a developer tool), and mixed content blocking (http stuff on https page).
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Mozilla Corporation has released an updated Firefox – Firefox 23 – for its Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android users.
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Firefox 23, released today, contains the usual mix of security work, standards conformance improvements, and minor bug fixes that we’ve come to expect from the regular browser releases. On top of these, it sports a trio of changes that you might actually notice.
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When Mozilla released Firefox 23 on Tuesday, the updated browser put an unofficial end to one of the annoyances of the early Web—the “blink” tag.
According to the release notes for the new browser, Firefox 23 completely drops support for the “blink” element, preventing browsers from rendering text that, well, blinks.
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Bango PLC, a mobile payment and analytics company, has announced the integration of its Bango Payments Platform with Mozilla’s Firefox Marketplace. Among other things, the news represents an important step forward for Mozilla’s Firefox OS strategy, because it will allow users of Firefox OS-based mobile phones to pay for the apps they buy directly from their phone bills.
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SaaS/Big Data
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A well-designed hybrid cloud enables organizations to take advantage of the scalability and cost efficiency of a public cloud, and retain the data governance, security and control of a private cloud
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IBM will furlough U.S. hardware employees to cut costs in late August and early September 2013. Employees will take a week off with one-third pay, Bloomberg reported. Ouch. The key takeaway: Cloud computing is squeezing IBM’s hardware business, and the value of IBM’s x86 server business could be falling — even more — each quarter.
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Apache’s Drill goal is striving to do nothing less than answer queries from petabytes of data and trillions of records in less than a second.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Not so fast, LibreOffice — OpenOffice has a shiny, new, and improved major release of its own
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CMS
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Brisbane-headquartered travel agency Flight Centre is undergoing a wholesale transition to the open-source Drupal Web platform for its network of websites, which collectively handle millions of page views per week.
The shift, away from IBM Web Content Manager has been underway for about 12 months now, according to Flight Centre’s area leader of digital solutions, Jamie Glenn. The travel company is about two-thirds of the way through the transition, Glenn said. The company has around 30 brands and some 60 websites.
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Business
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Funding
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In July, technology startup Sabai Technology launched a Kickstarter campaign. The project is called JaiRo and is described as an open source x86 router project.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The first round of videos from LibrePlanet 2013 is now available for streaming and downloading. LibrePlanet is an annual conference sponsored and organized by the Free Software Foundation, with LibrePlanet 2013 being the best one yet. All current associate members of the FSF enjoy the perk of being able to attend LibrePlanet without paying an entry fee. This year we set out to make sure LibrePlanet featured fully functioning live video streaming using only free software, and it was a great success. The videos are now available for viewing in VP8/Vorbis, both free media formats, and are hosted on an instance of GNU MediaGoblin, the social media sharing platform which many of you helped support.
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E-mail is the obvious starting point and, if you don’t trust that government agencies won’t get their hands on Microsoft (MSFT) and Google’s (GOOG) master keys, you should set up your own private e-mail service. A good package is Mozilla’s Thunderbird client, combined with the Enigmail security extension and the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). Here’s a guide to setting these up. Follow those instructions and set up a self-hosted e-mail server such as Kolab (not a trivial task), and you’re about as protected as you can get on that front.
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Public Services/Government
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I occasionally get asked why I spend so much of my free time writing software and giving it away for free. There are a number of reasons for this—I like to build things and I use it as an excuse to practice and improve my skills—but one of the most driving motivators for me is that I see open source contributions as a civic duty, a moral obligation to the rest of the world.
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Application delivery and security vendor Radware has contributed an open source distributed denial-of-service protection application to the OpenDaylight Project.
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The drive to bring open source technologies into focus for public services and the NHS in particular has been a recurring theme for more than half a decade now.
VP of Harris Healthcare EMEA Wayne Parslow has been calling on the NHS to “embrace” open platforms, standards and software — but he also heeds that we need to take care.
Parslow has spoken out on PublicService.co.uk highlighting the general reduction in software license fees that should be possible with any move to open technologies.
There is also huge potential for the NHS to develop more custom built applications and IT solutions bespoke to its core needs.
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An opinion piece debating the idea of implementing open source NHS technology in today’s healthcare marketplace
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The US Navy makes more efficient use of open source technology in complex unmanned aircraft than its counterparts in the Army and Air Force.
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Licensing
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Free software licenses can be divided into two broad categories: copyleft licenses (like the GPL), which require derivatives of the software to be licensed under the same terms; and permissive licenses (like the MIT/X11 license), which allow the software to be reused in any project, even closed-source projects. There are variations, of course—the LGPL, for example, is a ‘weak copyleft’, allowing licensed works to be used in closed-source works, but requiring improvements to the work itself to be released under a copyleft license.
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Openness/Sharing
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The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.
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CTD units are incredibly important to ocean research, measuring three basic factors of sea water — conductivity, temperature, and depth. Almost every major research vessel has one.
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Krishagni today announced the release of caTissue Plus v3.0 – Free and Open Source Biospecimen management software. caTissue Plus, initially developed with NCI funding, facilitates biorepository management by tracking biospecimens from collection to utilization across multiple projects, annotations, containers, specimen requests, distributions, and multiple reporting options.
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Open Hardware
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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) said it’s requiring the majority of U.S. employees in its hardware unit to take a week off with reduced pay, cutting costs as demand slows for products such as servers.
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Nuand has adopted the Lime Microsystems LMS6002D field programmable RF chip in its bladeRF open-source software defined radio (SDR). A Kickstarter-funded project, the bladeRF raised almost double its $100,000 target from more than 500 backers. Following Myriad RF and Fairwaves, it is the third open-source RF board launched this year.
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Want to do your own space experiment? From next week, you will be able to run science projects on the world’s first open-source satellites. And it won’t break the bank.
ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X were launched to the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 August aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle (which is also carrying fresh food, supplies and a talking humanoid robot).
Known as CubeSats, each mini satellite packs an array of devices – including cameras, spectrometers and a Geiger counter – into a cube just 10 centimetres to a side.
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From next week it will be possible to run science projects on the world’s first open-source satellites.
ArduSat-1 and ArduSat-X were launched to the International Space Station on 3 August aboard a Japanese resupply vehicle which will arrive tomorrow.
New Scientist reports the 10cm volume CubeSats contain an array of devices including cameras, spectrometers and a Geiger counter.
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Security
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Areas of blind spots within the typical enterprise are many, including applications, network traffic, network devices and user activity.
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Internet security firm Arbor Networks reports that a new botnet, Fort Disco, is made up of over 25,000 Windows PCs and is targeting blog sites and content management systems (CMS)es. Once these are infected, they can then be used to spread the botnet’s malware and to attack other systems.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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OK–so the right way to deal with the threat of terrorism is to announce that the U.S. response to any act of terrorism anywhere will be to attack Iran.
Who wrote this? Ted Koppel. Either his analysis is evolving, or he believes that threatening to unleash massive unprovoked military attacks on another country is not terrorism.
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US drones launched missiles at vehicles carrying four men, alleged to be members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen’s Marib province early Tuesday. The attack was the latest development in the global terror alert announced by the Obama administration last Friday. On Monday, the administration indicated that the alleged terror plot was centered in Yemen.
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So yesterday marked an unhappy anniversary: 49 years since Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing the Vietnam War. (H/T Caleb Brown.)
LBJ compared the resolution to “grandma’s nightshirt” because it “covered everything.” Like the 2002 Iraq War Resolution, it was worded broadly enough to allow the president to make the final decision about war all by himself—and vaguely enough to allow those who voted for it to deny responsibility for the war they’d authorized.
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Three U.S. drone strikes killed a total of 12 suspected al-Qaida militants Thursday, a Yemeni military official said, raising to eight the number of attacks in less than two weeks as the Arab nation is on high alert against terrorism.
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According to Yemeni officials, AQAP plotted to take over several cities in southeastern Yemen, including key port towns and the major cities of Hadramaut Province, blowing up pipelines in an attempt to sew confusion.
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The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) published a report last week confirming that the Central Intelligence Agency appears to have briefly revived its controversial “double-tap” drone tactic in a Pakistani region in mid-2012.
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Via Ace, consider this post an apology to our readership. A few days ago I led you to believe that it was somehow important for the White House press corps to ask the press secretary about one of the biggest foreign policy scoops in weeks. That was obviously in error, as I suspected at the time. It wasn’t important; this guy wouldn’t give you a straight answer on what his favorite color is (“I would refer you to my kindergarten finger-paintings on that”), never mind accusations about top-secret CIA activity linked to a major terror attack. Like I said in the earlier post, the press briefing now operates not as the White House’s conduit to the public but rather as an opportunity for the media to show the public that it’s asking worthwhile questions of the president even though there’s not a whisper of a chance that they’ll get useful information from them. The Brits have question time with the prime minister in parliament, we have this travesty. Second look at monarchy?
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The war in Syria poses the greatest threat to US security because of the risk of the government falling and the country becoming a weapons-rich haven for Al Qaeda, according to a CIA official.
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Today the Daily Beast reported that an intercepted conference call between “more than 20 al Qaeda operatives” led nearly two dozen U.S. embassies scattered across Southwest Asia and North Africa to shut down over the weekend, a precautionary measure that American officials later extended through August 10. Based on testimony from three unnamed U.S. officials, reporters Eli Lake and Josh Rogin say al Qaeda lieutenants in Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Egypt and Islamic Maghreb discussed vague plans of attack with al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri and the terrorist group’s Yemeni leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi. One of the unnamed officers compared the call to a meeting of the “Legion of Doom.”
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Transparency Reporting
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…the company is becoming a “major vendor” to the U.S. government…
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Highly radioactive water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is pouring out at a rate of 300 tons a day, officials said on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the government to step in and help in the clean-up.
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Finance
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Madison resident Betty Ybarra has never owned a home, but that’ll soon change.
“I was very skeptical this could even happen” she tells NBC15 about her new home she’s currently helping to build through an Occupy Madison project.
The group is currently building small homes. It isn’t much. Each are about 100 square feet. But it’s enough to help someone get back on their feet.
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PRESIDENT Nicos Anastasiades on Friday announced the complete reform of social policy based on the principle of securing a Guaranteed Minimum Income for all citizens.
It should be fully in place by June 2014, he said.
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The Wall Street Journal claimed that because private investment typically precedes infrastructure projects, President Obama’s call for increased infrastructure investments is misguided. This position, however, ignores the historically positive effect of public investment on private activity and the nation’s current need for infrastructure improvements.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A candidate running well behind in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary is not usually someone national media pay attention to. But when the candidate is a former Congressman now involved in his second sex scandal, the media’s level of interest is considerably greater.
[...]
See, it turns out that spending so much time talking about Weiner is important– it gives corporate journalists a way to handicap the 2016 election.
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Six people were arrested Monday when protesters descended upon the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago to push back against the impending visit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose conservative agenda, activists say, promotes policies and legislation that protects corporate interests and disenfranchises workers and voters.
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Erick Erickson doubled down on his sexist attack on Texas State Senator Wendy Davis as “Abortion Barbie,” writing on RedState that the moniker “fits perfectly” and recommending it be used on the campaign trail.
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The vague-yet-apparently-very-serious intelligence about a possible Al-Qaeda attack became a big issue on the Sunday chat shows–and a chance for supporters of National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs to claim that the agency’s controversial tactics are working.
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Today, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a new report: “ALEC at 40: Turning Back the Clock on Prosperity and Progress.” The report identifies and analyzes 466 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bills introduced in 2013.
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This morning in Chicago hundreds of primarily Republican state legislators are getting more indoctrination against doing anything about climate change from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
This year, ALEC has chosen its long-time partner, the Heartland Institute, to help host the session. Heartland is so extreme on the issue of climate change that it sought to equate people who believe the climate is changing with the Unabomber, through a billboard campaign that featured a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski with the line: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Heartland lost numerous funders in response to a citizens campaign about the ad last year.
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Privacy
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In the era of NSA spying and the rise of widespread government monitoring programs or even just the era of Skype, if you’re looking for something new and secure alternatives then Tox Messaging is coming soon for you.
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For privacy campaigners, the issue of big data has been a cause for some time, with a growing trend of governments, businesses and other institutions gathering increasing amounts of data which is then analysed, often without consent from individuals.
It seems that universities are increasingly thinking about using the vast amount of data collected to analyse how facilities are used and identify students who may fail or drop out of their course. By doing this, universities are acting like they don’t require permission to use the data in this way and are seriously undermining student trust.
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There is a sinister agenda underway to forcibly convert every standard electric meter in the U.S. to the “smart” variety under the guise of promoting renewable energy interests.
[...]
Landis Gyr recently had a company voicemail message that admitted smart meter technology is part of the NSA’s “PRISM” spying and surveillance program. Since gaining national attention about this admission, Landis Gyr has apparently altered its company voicemail message to omit this indicting information.
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It is just a matter of time before unauthorised, real-time access to information about the behaviours and habits of you and your family at home are put under the microscope via Smart Meter data. Don’t give them the chance to put privacy-violating infrastructure in your home which can at any time be compromised and used against you by any number of parties – foreign and domestic. You have the right to refuse Smart Meters – use it! – See more at: http://stopsmartmeters.org.uk/nsa-prism-provides-direct-access-to-servers-of-google-facebook-microsoft-yahoo-apple-and-others/#sthash.gMYZYr3G.dpuf
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With an increasing importance placed on communication via social media, privacy is imperative now more than ever over the Internet. The NSA scandal has shown that there is a great demand for secure communication on the Internet. However, many people do not try to protect their privacy by any means either because encryption is difficult to implement in social media or simply because they are unaware of the resources out there for encryption. Encryption needs to be made easily available for everyone so that privacy is no longer a concern.
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Again this is the kind of thing that many people had assumed was going on, but it hadn’t been confirmed until now. Of course, the NSA’s response was not to talk about whether or not this was true, but to claim, yet again, that everything it’s doing is “authorized,” which is a way of deflecting the fact that it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. In this case, the claim is that the NSA isn’t storing these emails, but rather: “temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border,” and the whole process only takes “a small number of seconds” before the records are deleted.
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There’s a story in the New York Times today that details how the NSA hasn’t just been tracking communications to and from (potential) foreigners of interest—it’s actually tracking all emails and text messages that potentially mention these targets. That dragnet just got a lot wider. This is the actualization of the tired and at one time absurd “oops better not say bomb on email” jokes.
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It’s difficult to keep track of what the NSA does and doesn’t do, and today, the New York Times piled on. Citing “senior intelligence officials,” the paper is reporting that, under a broad interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA intercepts communications of U.S. citizens whose communications cross borders and mention foreign targets. You don’t have to communicate with someone being targeted directly to potentially have the NSA collect and search your email.
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A manual for America’s taxmen detailing US drug squads’ access to NSA intelligence has emerged – and revealed that the controversial supply of information has been an open secret in government for years.
Reuters reports that the handbook, which was issued to IRS tax collectors between 2005 and 2006, instructs officials to omit reference to any tip-offs supplied by the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits and court proceedings.
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Weeks of revelations about secret U.S. surveillance programs could stymie progress on negotiations over new laws and regulations meant to beef up the country’s defences against the growing threat of cyber attacks, cyber security experts say.
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Not every suspension-of-service notice for an e-mail company comes with a link to a legal-defense fund. Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, whose clients, reportedly, have included Edward Snowden, made it sound today as though he could use the help. “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levison wrote in a note posted on his site.
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Some members of Mr Snowden’s family are applying for visas to visit him in Russia, his lawyer says.
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The cyberscare, like the redscare or the greenscare of the ’90′s, is already under way. We’ve seen it take root with the fierce federal persecution of Aaron Swartz, the hefty charges and prison sentence facing LulzSec hacktivist Jeremy Hammond and the three-year jail sentence handed down to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer for pointing out and sharing a vulnerability in AT&T’s user information network. On Tuesday, former NSA chief Michael Hayden put it into words.
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Germany’s BND intelligence service sends “massive amounts” of intercepts to the NSA daily, according to a report based on Edward Snowden’s leaks. It suggests a tight relationship has been developed between the two agencies – which the BND claims is legal.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Snowden and obtained by Der Spiegel revealed that the 500 million pieces of phone and email communications metadata collected by the NSA in Germany last December were “apparently” provided with the BND’s approval.
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The Internal Revenue Service reportedly received incriminating information on US citizens from the Drug Enforcement Agency, with the assistance of the National Security Agency, before concealing the paper trail from defendants.
Details of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) program that provides tips to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and then advises them to “recreate the investigative trail” were published in a manual used by IRS agents for two years, Reuters revealed.
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According to Computerworld such a low-energy system move evolve into an exascale system, which would be about 1,000 faster than today’s petaflop system.
The US Director of National Intelligence published a notice asking for help to develop superconducting systems. Such a system can offer “an attractive low-power alternative” to current technology.
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Thursday an NSA source informed the world of a primary and egregious lie by President Obama about the information collected by the program called PRISM. Obama’s ‘Spygate’ will force the end of the NSA operation, and end the invasion of privacy by our elected officials.
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Germany’s opposition has condemned aspects of information-sharing between the country’s intelligence services and their US counterparts. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition-leading Christian Democrats have cried foul.
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Former NSA chief Michael Hayden, who ran the shady US spying bureaucracy from 1999 to 2009, responded to a question about Edward Snowden by painting privacy activists as terrorists and comparing them to al Qaida.
“If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?” Hayden asked, reffering to “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”.
He continued: “They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States”.
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There are many more revelations to come from the leaks about US spying from Edward Snowden, with journalist Glenn Greenwald testifying that he had received around 20,000 files from the American whistleblower and fugitive.
Greenwald has been the journalist working with Snowden to release information about the US spying programmes both domestic and international that have caused such controversy around the globe. He has worked with The Guardian the UK to reveal secrets about NSA spying within US borders and on Western Europe, as well as with Brazillian newspaper O Globo, where he has focused his revelations on those affecting Brazil and South America.
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Civil Rights
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Speaking at a youth camp President Vladimir Putin has hinted that he was not planning to sack the government in the foreseeable future and said that he was satisfied by its work.
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Mickey Huff in studio with Peter Phillips review the NEW award-winning documentary “Project Censored the Movie: Ending the Reign of Junk Food News” AND newly released interview outtakes with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky talking about Project Censored, war, history, and the media. These are only available to the general public here and now for the first time!
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The Latvian government says it will extradite a 28-year-old man accused of creating the Web injects for the highly destructive Gozi malware, which targeted over a million computers globally, specifically aimed at bank accounts. US prosecutors say the malware was used to steal millions of dollars from its targets.
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Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”
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As the U.S. Senate continues to debate a national law to protect journalists from protecting their sources, two Senators believe unpaid bloggers and websites like WikiLeaks shouldn’t get extended First Amendment protections.
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While local opponents of the National Defense Authorization Act won a partial victory at the county level last week, they may encounter an even tougher battle within the city limits.
The Coos Bay City Council voted 5-2 Wednesday night to postpone further discussion of an anti-NDAA resolution until councilors had time to research the issue.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Nominet are again consulting on their idea to introduce .uk domain registration. But the proposals are little better than before.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Anti-piracy legislation introduced in Russia less than a week ago is already back with legislators. The Ministry of Culture says that the law will be amended to include not only movies and TV shows as previously planned, but a wide range of other creative content. Website owners will be required to make their contact details available to rightsholders in order to speed up complaints while tech companies such as Google have until Friday to put forward their suggestions.
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Over the past few months several Hollywood studios have asked Google to remove links to the “free-to-share” Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK. The film’s director, Simon Klose, has contacted the search engine in an attempt to have the links put back online but thus far without success. Meanwhile, film studios continue to submit new DMCA requests to censor the documentary.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
08.06.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Eke. Smart TVs may be intelligent, but they certainly aren’t invincible. A team of researchers at the Black Hat conference this week detailed and warned that Samsung’s line of Smart TVs were “rife with vulnerabilities that could leave the devices vulnerable to remote attacks.” It sounds eerie, and the potential is certainly huge. Granted, it’s important to remember that Black Hat hacks are explained to the companies ahead of time, and the specific hacking methods are kept private in order to keep this from becoming a nefarious thing.
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Sysgo announced the port of their Industrial Grade Linux ELinOS to Delta's next generation power system controller.
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Think of that for a moment… If a single organization should lean to GNU/Linux because of the cost of 20 million licences for an OS, how fast should the world move to GNU/Linux on thousands of millions of computers? It’s exactly the same problem, “How do we reduce the cost of the whole system to something more affordable? . It has the same solution, “Use Free/Libre Open Source Software, the GNU/Linux OS.” . Sticking with M$’s OS is succumbing to a divide-and-conquer approach. Together we are bigger and better than M$ and GNU/Linux is our OS. Millions of programmers around the world have worked for years and pooled their resources for everyone to share.
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My name is janith kashan and i am a software engneer as well as i have done CCNA (Cisco Cerificate In Network Admistartion) so i want to tell you is me and my group can promot linux OS in sril lanka so if my idea is a good one please let me know you can send me a mail to my e mail
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Big week for Linux news with major kernel news and a reshaping of the Linux desktop space.
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My vote goes to 2006-07. I started in mid-2006 and the chance meeting with Linux was purely political. I had won an uncontested primary for the Green Party’s nomination for Insurance Commissioner of California and, as a Green, I didn’t take corporate contributions. Faced with the prospect of having to buy Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to make campaign materials, the IT guy for the California Green Party asked me if I had heard of “Free/Open Source Software.” I hadn’t, but I was quickly brought up to speed: I didn’t need Adobe — there was Scribus and GIMP that would do the same thing. “Oh, and the Mac you have? It will run an operating system called Linux — try Debian and see how you like it.”
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Desktop
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If you’re gifted with independently manipulable eyebrows, now would be the time to raise a single brow. An inventor in Canada claims to have created a solar-powered Ubuntu laptop that can run directly from power generated by its built-in solar panels, or recharge its 10-hour battery with just two hours of sunshine. If that wasn’t enough, the laptop — pretentiously dubbed Sol — is ruggedized for military and off-road use and you also get built-in GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi, and 3G/4G LTE. The best bit, though, is the price: The Sol will cost just $350 — or $400 if you want a submersible, waterproof model.
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This is what I observed in schools in Canada. Individuals fed up with holding M$’s train just installed GNU/Linux and moved on leaving “the tax”, the restrictions and phoning home all behind. This is no doubt part of the slowdown in legacy PC shipments. Older PCs are being given new life with GNU/Linux and running and running… just like the EverReady Bunny.
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I decided to begin my investigations regarding The State of Linux in Asia-Pacific, here in New Zealand. This article is the first in a series. After spending some time in each of the major cities speaking with I.T. leaders and users alike, I find that New Zealand may epitomize successful Linux adoption in this region.
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Server
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Netcraft has provided it’s latest Hosting Providers sites ordered by failures.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this week’s episode a Call To Arms is issued relative to testing the extra special Xubuntu Xmir live ISO image in non-virtualized environments as further discussed here. The Xubuntu team is facing a decision-making deadline of August 22nd as to what they’re going to do relative to XMir.
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Kernel Space
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Last evening, on August 4, Linus Torvalds announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.11.
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Sticking to his plan to select one longterm stable kernel release every years, Greg KH, the Linux Foundation fellow and a lead kernel developer, has chosen 3.10 as the stable release.
This release will be maintained for the next two years giving enterprises, embedded players and many millions other to bake their cake on top of that.
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Through a series of commits today to Coreboot, initial support for AMD Kabini APUs is present, courtesy of Advanced Micro Devices and Sage Electronics Engineering. AMD Kabini is the low-power APU targeting sub-notebook/netbook/ultra-thin devices and based upon AMD’s Jaguar micro-architecture.
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Patches were published today that add support to Wayland’s Weston compositor for Sony Clickpad touchpads.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA released version 0.7 of libvdpau, the VDPAU wrapper library for interacting with driver-specific Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) implementations.
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For those concerned about the Reverse PRIME and multi-screen Reverse Optimus enablement for the AMD open-source X.Org driver, the support is now present in its Git tree.
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Back-ends have been implemented for VDPAU to implement the video hardware-based decoding process over OpenGL and through Intel’s VA-API interface, for those not using the NVIDIA binary blob or the VDPAU Gallium3D state tracker.
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Phoronix benchmarks have already shown that Mesa 9.2 dramatically improves the Intel Haswell Linux experience and that there’s even some performance gains for other intel GPUs. On the AMD Radeon side, Mesa 9.2 also improves the performance for AMD hardware. How does Mesa 9.2 change the game for the Nouveau driver with NVIDIA graphics hardware? Here’s some new results looking at the Mesa 9.1 vs. Mesa 9.2 performance for Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver.
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Benchmarks
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The performance of the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver for AMD Fusion APUs has improved a lot, but the Gallium3D driver performance still isn’t yet on par with the AMD Catalyst binary driver. In this article are a variety of tests from an AMD APU including with the Linux 3.11 dynamic power management support, Mesa Git, and when using the R600 SB shader optimization back-end.
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Applications
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Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly.
When referring to productivity tools, we do not mean the main applications that you use. Enhancing productivity is concerned with ways of helping an individual make more effective use of their office suite, web browser, email client, design tools, groupware applications, programming environments, etc.
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MPV is yet another fork of the mplayer/mplayer2 code-base, but it does at least offer up some changes over the code currently found in MPlayer2.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s been revealed that a new aircraft flight simulator game, which last year was released for Windows and the Xbox 360 / PlayStation 3 consoles, will soon see a native port released for Linux as well as OS X via Steam.
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Shadow Warrior Classic Redux, a remastered version of the classic game launched back in 1997, has just received a Linux version.
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As everyone knows, generally Linux has never had a strong argument against Windows OS when it comes to gaming. 9/10 people will say they use something like Windows 7 or XP for their gaming (depending on the DirectX version being used/required).
[...]
For those who have not considered a Linux machine for gaming, I say, why not? For those already there, I say, welcome!
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Upgrading things is a big part of cyberpunk fiction. Arms receive hidden blades, faces become nightmarish Google Glass perversions, and children become Akira-like cyberflesh monsters. It’s pretty weird. But Shadowrun Returns developer Harebrained Schemes are embracing the concept, and have posted a round-up of the future upgrades planned for their tactical RPG.
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In the latest monthly alpha update to the Unvanquished open-source first person shooter are some renderer improvements, art asset enhancements, and much more.
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I don’t know about you but, despite having an endless list of gaming titles in my Steam for Linux library, I never feel like I quite have enough…
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MONACO: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE, originally released in April 2013, is Pocketwatch Games’ love-letter to the heist film genre, projected into a real-time stealth, co-op multiplayer game. Assemble a crack team of thieves and execute the perfect crime. Choose them from a familiar list of archetypes, including The Pickpocket, The Cleaner, and The Lookout. Exploit their individual skills, and the spoils are yours. Monaco boasts a colorful and unique retro-style, a throwback to a romanticized time; much like the films to which it pays homage.
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Air Conflicts – Experience top combat action in this brand new arcade flight sim and become immersed in the exploits of famous aircraft carriers. The developers have stated they expect it to hit Linux in a few weeks.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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If you have never messed around with a Linux system, but have seen a YouTube video about it, there’s a high chance that you’ve seen someone show off their fancy desktop effects, most notably the “wobbly windows” effect. These effects are possible due to the window manager software that controls the windows that contain the various programs that you run. However, like most other Linux applications, there’s more than one that does the job, and the top two that offer the complete package are Compiz and KWin. While both of these solutions have their specific areas, we can still compare the objectively to see which one is more customizeable and functional.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Our daily lives are becoming more gadget-assisted every day and (as we approach to the “internet of things”) we have more and more computers around us in the shape of TVs, smartphones, cameras, media centers…
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This week, I’ve been working on exposing Amarok’s playlist management and dynamic playlists.
The playlist interface pretty much mirrors the internal Amarok hierarchy, exposing three components- the playlist manager, playlist-providers and the playlist objects themselves.
No synced playlists for now though.
The dynamic playlist is, however, a whole different beast. What I want for the dynamic playlists is to have a scriptable bias, besides exposing the existing biases. As far as the existing biases are concerned, I was able to expose them via a single class using some Qt meta-magic:
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digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 3.3.0. This version include a new core implementation to manage faces, especially face recognition feature which have never been completed with previous release. Face detection feature still always here and work as expected.
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Packages for the release of the Calligra Suite 2.7.1 are available for Kubuntu 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04. You can get it from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. They are also in our development release.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME developers announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of the fifth development release towards GNOME System Monitor 3.10, for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.
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The GNOME project announced plans for supporting Wayland quite a while ago and progress has been reported incrementally for months. Wayland was supported in GNOME 3.95 for the particularly crafty, but starting with 3.10, binaries will be offered for Wayland right beside X. Matthias Clasen posted of this and other decisions made today at Guadec.
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When it comes to hacking, security, forensics thing like that, linux is the only and the preferred tool. Linux is very hacker friendly from ground up. But still there are distros that are more oriented towards assisting hackers. To name a few, backtrack, backbox, blackbuntu etc.
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New Releases
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The stable release of gNewSense 3.0 is a fact. With the help of GNU Linux-libre and various other people helping to check and hack on freedom issues, we’ve been able to produce a new major version that aligns with the Free Software Foundation’s freedom guidelines as well as Debian’s quality standards. You’ll find that the look has changed from previous releases, marking the change from Ubuntu to Debian as a base. We also support 3 architectures now: i386, amd64 and mipsel (Lemote Yeeloong).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the August 2013 issue
of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS
community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote,
Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some
rights are reserved.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced continued global expansion with new and expanded facilities around the world. Red Hat also announced that its facilities in Raleigh, N.C., Westford, Mass., and Beijing are expected to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, highlighting the company’s commitment to building environmentally sound offices. Today, Red Hat has more than 80 offices worldwide with more than 5,700 employees.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“The deal would be palatable if every Ubuntu Edge was delivered with shares of stock in Canonical, but as it stands now, why would I want to invest money to help Canonical make money?” said Robin Lim, a lawyer and blogger. “Eventually, we do have to realize, we are not partners in this venture. Just potential customers who Canonical wants to profit from.”
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You know the drill: you’re having a relaxing time browsing cat photos and hamster .gifs on the internet when “ping!” – your laptop battery starts to demand suckling time on the nearest AC power point.
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Crowd funding is the way forward if you want to guarantee yourself with a set number of audience, buyers, and investors who will ensure you stay afloat as long as you’re dishing out content worth investing.
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The Internet of Things keeps on growing. This week Canonical’s Victor Palau leaked new details about his company’s upcoming Ubuntu device, MIT researchers pulled the curtains back on a 3-D printer that can produce food, and Nvidia’s long anticipated SHIELD console finally hit stores.
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Ubuntu Touch starts getting real When Ubuntu Touch debuted to developers this winter, it was more of a mockup than an OS, despite its promise. Now a beta version for developers reveals Ubuntu Touch taking shape in an operational way. Design similarities to Windows Phone and iOS 7 prove the “flat,” modern look is in.
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Canonical may be facing an uphill battle in bringing the Ubuntu Edge, its Linux-powered “superphone,” to market. But in a sign of the company’s impressive influence within the mobile ecosystem, it has been quietely building a network of channel partners through its Carrier Advisory Group (CAG), which includes a number of big-name mobile carriers and which continues to grow.
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Flavours and Variants
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Today in Open Source: The five best Ubuntu spins! Plus: Twenty five free intelligent Android games, and eight apps for Linux system administrators
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While Ubuntu is switching to MIR from Xorg, ditching Wayland, other Ubuntu flavors have not yet decided whether they will follow the suite of not. Since KDE and Gnome communities have put their weight behind community developed Wayland, it’s quite obvious that Kubuntu or Gnome edition may not switch to XMIR yet. One flavor has however gone ahead and offers XMIR based images for users to try – it’s Xubuntu.
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Full disclosure: I live with Kayla, and had to jump in to help resolve an enraging problem we ran into on the Kubuntu installation with KDE, PulseAudio and the undesirable experience of not having sound in applications. It involved a fair bit of terminal work and investigation, plus a minimal understanding of how sound works on Linux. TuxRadar has a good article that tries to explain things. When there are problems, though, the diagram looks much more like the (admittedly outdated) 2007 version:
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The Xubuntu team hasn’t decided yet if the Xfce Ubuntu flavor will switch to XMir or continue with X.org for 13.10. Before making the decision, this needs to be properly tested so an Xubuntu ISO running on Mir & XMir has been made available for download.
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When I started this series of blogs, I asked: “Can you do signal processing on the Pi?” I think the answer is a resounding yes.
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Hardkernel and its community Odroid project opened $149 pre-orders on an updated version of the open platform Odroid single board computer, featuring Samsung’s eight-core Exynos 5410 Octa SoC. The Odroid-XU runs Android, Ubuntu, and other Linux OSes, and offers features including an eMMC socket, two USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, HDMI video, 100Mbit Ethernet, and more.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony has released the open source files for the new Sony Xperia Z Ultra, and you can download the files direct from Sony’s developer website at the link below., the release is in the form of software versions 14.1.B.0.461.
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Google Ventures is blazing a new trail for venture investors, delivering advice and services to its portfolio companies with in-house teams of experts in the fields of design, marketing, recruiting and engineering. I had a fascinating discussion with Google Ventures design partner Jake Knapp about how he and his four design partners help Google Ventures portfolio companies design better products and better businesses.
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Last week, the news broke that Android phone users with Office 365 subscriptions can now download Microsoft Office Mobile App, letting them create and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Office Mobile, of course, has been available for Apple devices, but it is notable that Microsoft has cozied up to Android, an open source platform.
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Much has been made about Google’s $35 Chromecast dongle, which lets users stream their desktops and video to large screen TVs, but there is now a similar application for the Raspberry Pi that offers some of the same functionality: PiCast. Its developer has an informational page up here, where he notes: “I thought what do I have that I could use w/HDMI [licensing] and wouldn’t be terribly hard to do? My Arduino? Nope BUT my Raspberry Pi can do it all, literally and [at the] same price as the Chromecast.”
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Admit it—all those meetings are mind-numbing. So other than slurping coffee by the gallon, what can you do to snap out of brain fog, sharpen your wits and have a little fun while you’re at it? Brainiac game apps ought to do it!
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The best way to secure your network is to try to tear it down, through penetration testing. With dSploit, you can now do it on the move
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Panasonic announced a DECT-compatible digital cordless landline phone that runs Android 4.0 with Google Play access. The KX-PRX120 is equipped with a 3.5-inch, HVGA screen on the handset, which offers a front-facing camera for Skype calls, as well as WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS for mobile Android use, but lacks cellular technology.
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Zink Imaging announced the launch of two Android-powered, WiFi-enabled label and photo printers that don’t require ink cartridges, but instead use heat to create images on special adhesive-backed paper. The $199 Zinc hAppy and $299 hAppy+, which adds a 3.5-inch touchscreen, are designed to be controlled via Android and iOS apps.
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Small tablets are making big gains, while Apple is beginning to plateau, says market researcher Canalys.
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The company offers backers who didn’t receive a console until after it was on store shelves a $13.37 credit for use in the Ouya Discovery Store.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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IDC has released its figures for shipments of tablet PCs in Q2 of 2013. There are huge rates of growth in unit-shipments for Android/Linux suppliers but the big story is that Apple’s market share of units is down dramatically
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I came upon a post by Ashwin Dixit, Ownlifeful: India and Open-Source Software. It’s a brief but reasonable list of advantages for India, or any other country to adopt GNU/Linux widely.
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When Drupal creator Dries Buytaert addressed the inaugural DrupalCon Sydney conference earlier this year he said the open source project’s community had to move beyond seeing it purely as a content-management system. Drupal can compete with the proprietary Web experience management solutions provided by companies like Adobe and Sitecore, Buytaert said.
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Osell, a subsidiary of DinoDirect China Limited, has recently launched a marketing campaign that will navigate through the bush of e-commerce practitioners and reach its specialized customers.
“The purpose of this campaign is to identify our customers more accurately and reach out to them in a more efficient way. The target customers of Osell would be those who already own an e-commerce website, either created by open source software such as Magento and Zen Cart or created by their own technical teams, and intending to sell their products on their websites,” the marketing director of Osell Mingpu Su says.
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At the time, the United States was pumping nearly $4 billion into new voting machines, spurred on by Florida’s 2000 presidential election fiasco. But the shift to machines built by companies such as Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems (now called Dominion Voting Systems) had introduced all sorts of new problems.
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Notice how everyone is on their smartphones these days? We’re now at the point where mobile Internet usage is poised to actually overtake desktop Internet usage. This tectonic shift is projected to happen within the next year according to many analysts. Sales of mobile devices already surpassed desktop and notebook PC sales in 2012 and we can all see, anecdotally, how people can’t imagine living without their smart phones. This presents a unique challenge to businesses that have previously relied on desktop websites to reach their target market.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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What good is a device with a mind blowing super high resolution touch screen when it’s browser isn’t taking advantage of that screen. Yes I am talking about Chrome Pixel.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla uploaded a few hours ago, August 6, the final packages of the Mozilla Firefox 23.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
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SaaS/Big Data
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IBM this week said it is backing the VMware-launched Cloud Foundry initiative. IBM said it will collaborate with Pivotal, the company spun out of VMware, the sponsor of Cloud Foundry on the open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) project.
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Because Hadoop is open source, “the entire planet with lots of innovative minds all over the place can direct their attention to their problems to enhance the platform in particular ways to make their life better. The aggregate benefit is that it is just not a fair fight. That is not to say that Hadoop is perfect in every possible way. There is much that we as a community need to do.”
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BSD
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The first release candidate for FreeBSD 9.2 is out this morning and it’s on time compared to past FreeBSD releases that have been belated.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.4, the fifth release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.
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Because Android is Free Software and gratis, the non-free software competition cannot compete with it, therefore the market has less alternatives, thus the consumer suffers from this lack of competition. In a nutshell that is the argumentation of the so-called “Fair Search” coalition. Essentially they are asking the European Commission to favour a restrictive business model over a liberal one, which is exactly the opposite of what competition regulators should do in order to achieve a fair market.
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During the lecture, held at NYU by HackNY—a nonprofit, organized by Columbia and NYU faculty, whose mission is to “federate the next generation of hackers”—Stallman advocated the benefits of truly free software.
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He also claims software as a service (SaaS) is inherently bad because your information goes through a server beyond your control and that server can add additional software when it likes.
“The server has your data and it will probably show it to the NSA,” he said to a crowd that was all too aware of recent events with Wikileaks and “our great hero Edward Snowden.” Instead he encourages peer-to peer apps to avoid third parties.
That’s why he takes issue with open source software. He says it’s booked as a way to have people test and improve code quality at no cost, but it doesn’t give them any control over the software.
“Our ideals become forgotten,” he said of open source eclipsing free software, and encouraged the audience to keep talking about free software.
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Openness/Sharing
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The word ‘community’ has many definitions, especially in the world of open source software and Linux. Urban planner, artist and TED fellow Candy Chang has her own understanding of community, cultivated through collective art projects in her hometown of New Orleans. Her “Before I Die” project, for example, transformed an abandoned house in her neighborhood into an interactive wall for people to share their hopes and dreams — a project The Atlantic called “one of the most creative community projects ever.”
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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Astute readers will have noticed that we’ve begun publishing our “Open Voices” eBooks in the ePub format. Now, some of our best essays and interviews are available as lightweight and portable files, and can be read on any electronic reading device that supports this open standard.
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EFF is at Black Hat and DEF CON this week, two conferences that draw a wide variety of people from tech including security researchers, coders, engineers, and everyday users. This year, EFF is pushing its campaign around making common sense changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—including a phone booth called the CFAA DC Dialer that allows DEF CON attendees to call their Representative.
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Boston-based Boundless, which creates “textbook alternatives” from open-source content, is launching a $19.99 interactive textbook that it says gives students a more structured approach to studying.
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Open Hardware
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For almost 15 years, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Last year, the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) took shape, which is a well funded and organized central entity that can provide oversight to some of the most important open source robotics efforts. The organization recently helped the U.S. Defense Department host its Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) entirely in the cloud, with participants in the competition competing from remote locations using SoftLayer Technologies’ cloud computing platform.
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For decades anyone buying a new computer did so in the knowledge that within a few years it would be overtaken by a much faster machine.
Driving this rapid evolution has been Moore’s Law – which has allowed the building block of information processing, the transistor – to be packed in greater numbers onto ever smaller computer chips.
But Moore’s Law is slowing, as various engineering challenges have limited the rate at which transistors can be added to processors and this throttling back will increasingly provide an opening for the little guys to make their mark in the hardware world.
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Working with the minnowboard.org open source community Intel has helped produce a sub-$200 PC (GBP £130) aimed at software application developers.
The MinnowBoard is an Intel Atom processor-based raw materials (i.e. motherboard only) unit aimed at the low cost, hobbyist and embedded computing markets.
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A while back I wrote about some Open-Source Electrical Engineering Design tools. Several of you chimed in to add some even more highly useful tool ideas. The short summary of the blog is that some excellent tools exist for doing simple EE design for test and measurement: KiCAD for schematic, LTSpice for simulation, FreePCB for layout and anyone you trust for printed circuit board (PCB) manufacture (I use Advanced Circuits). Some readers contributed some great additions, including PCB prototyping options Sunstone Circuits and OSH Park.
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With the successful space launch of ArduSat aboard a H-IIB rocket, the first open satellite platform that allows private citizens to design and run their own applications in space is now on its way to the International Space Station (ISS).
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Programming
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The development team of the Anjuta IDE (Integrated Development Environment) announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download and testing of the fifth development release towards Anjuta 3.10.
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Intel developers working on the LLVM compiler infrastructure have been working on AVX-512 instruction set support in recent days. Intel AVX-512 instructions support 512-bit SIMD instructions with providing twice the number of data elements handled by AVX/AVX2 with a single instruction and four times that of SSE instructions.
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The OpenMP 4.0 specification has been unveiled as a major new specification for programming of accelerators, SIMD programming, and better optimization using thread affinity.
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Hardware
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Health/Nutrition
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Nearly 10,000 people who worked at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant are eligible for workers’ compensation if they develop leukemia, but few are aware of this and other cancer redress programs.
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An official at Japan’s nuclear watchdog told Reuters on Monday radioactive water seeping from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant into the sea constitutes an “emergency,” an assessment far more extreme than previously stated.
“Right now, we have an emergency,” head of Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, Shinji Kinjo, told the news service.
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A dozen cities in Argentina mobilized in May to protest the multinational Monsanto. In Cordoba, where Monsanto plans to install its largest plant in Latin America, the march was massive and a survey reveals that the population rejects the company.
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Security
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A small, Linux-powered device unveiled at DEF CON allows hackers to take over devices’ Wi-Fi connections and manipulate data flows
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Many good open-source software tools are freely available for penetration testers (and hackers) for testing the security of WiFi networks and their users. Getting those tools to run on a given computer isn’t always easy, and walking around with a notebook running WiFi penetration tools isn’t exactly the right approach if you’re trying to be discrete.
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A security researcher picks apart the shady world of Booter services that offer distributed denial of service attacks as a service.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In Pakistan, “people are angry, upset, hurting, grieving. This is not something that makes sense either morally or from a national security point of view.”
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The US has so far killed more than 2,500 people in its ‘secret’ drone war in Pakistan. All but 22 of 372 recorded CIA strikes have taken place in Waziristan – a hostile and inaccessible area for journalists and researchers.
In the past two years the Bureau has published three major investigations into CIA strikes in Pakistan – all based on field research in Waziristan. So how has it been able to achieve this?
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These aren’t the airplane-sized drones that the U.S. military and intelligence services have used to seek out and kill alleged terrorists with laser-guided missiles. Instead, they are oversized model planes fitted with cameras, thermal-imaging units and global-positioning systems and often launched by hand. They can be cheaper than a helicopter to operate, so law enforcement agencies are increasingly thinking about using them over U.S. soil. But privacy concerns have brought together liberals concerned about individual freedom with tea partiers suspicious about government in urging restraint when it comes to drones.
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The FBI has said drones allow the FBI to learn critical information that otherwise would be difficult to obtain without introducing serious risk to law enforcement personnel. For example, the FBI used drones at night during a six-day hostage standoff in Alabama earlier this year. It ended when members of an FBI rescue team stormed an underground bunker, killing gunman Jimmy Lee Dykes before he could harm a 5-year-old boy held hostage.
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Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, attired in English suit and shinning tie, has finally smiled—thanks to Master John Kerry from the United States of America.
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A president who came into office pledging to take the ‘war on terror’ out of the shadows plunged it deeper into those shadows
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“I told you so!” was the tone coming from the NSA chief today as more terror attack warnings were released all over the place.
“Now you don’t mind being snooped on so much do you, huh, huh, huh?” the NSA chief said then he added, “We just saved your asses from fake terrorist attacks that were never going to happen by unknown terrorists and stuff.”
A man from Devoyne, North Texas said: “Is it safe to come out from under the table now?”
Many in the Chicago metro area were holed up in basements all night and day yesterday local news stations were reporting.
In New York city a woman was so scared that she could not talk.
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The CIA was smuggling weapons from Libyan weapons depots to the Syrian rebels during the 2012 attack on the US embassy in Benghazi. According to a report by CNN, an unnamed source has leaked that the alleged cover-up of the circumstances around the attack is to hide the reality of the smuggling, which occurred before the escalation of the Syrian civil war. This shows that the CIA has been arming the Syrian rebels since at least September 2012. The agents were running the operation out of the Benghazi “annex,” which has been reported as a secret safehouse of the CIA in the city, not far from the embassy.
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Stones, instead of rifles or bullets, are the weapon of Kashmir’s newest fighters.
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We all knew the battle between IBM and Amazon Web Services over which gets to build the CIA cloud goes well beyond the $600 million contract itself. With the U.S. government’s “cloud-first” initiative many billions of dollars worth of business are at stake. Whichever vendor finally gets the nod from the CIA will automatically gain credibility for other government agencies wanting to build secure clouds. In short if IBM wins, no government bureaucrat will be fired for buying IBM cloud. Ditto for AWS.
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Common sense tells me that cops don’t need a Taser or a shotgun to subdue a 95-year-old man.
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A president who came into office pledging to take the war on terror out of the shadows plunged it deeper into those shadows
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By grounding the drones, we will stop creating new enemies faster than we can kill them.
2. Close the U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia. One of the reasons Osama bin Laden said he hated the United States was that the United States had military bases in the Holy Lands in Saudi Arabia. President Bush quietly closed those bases in 2003, but in 2010 President Obama secretly reopened a base there for launching drones into Yemen. It’s a national security threat ripe for blowback. So are many of the over 800 U.S. bases peppered all over the world. We can save billions of taxpayer dollars, and make ourselves safer, by closing them.
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The global terror alert shows the jihadists aren’t just alive and well – they are thriving. Bruce Riedel on the birth of a new terror generation.
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Last week the LA Times and Washington Post both carried op-eds calling for an end to the so-called War on Terror
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The surveillance video captures the final moments of Hastings life and provides intriguing details of the “crash.” The video shows a flash of light appearing at the 13-14 second mark, the headlights are on at 14 seconds, but all lights are extinguished at the 16-second mark. The car then turns left and the first horizontal explosion appears just after the 16-second mark (it ejects the left front tire across northbound highland approximately 40-50 feet). The second explosion engulfs the engine compartment at the 17-second mark. The third and largest explosion consumes the passenger compartment at the 17-18-second mark.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.
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Like a towheaded baby whose golden curls inevitably turn mousy brown at exactly the same age he or she starts giving a crap about hair color, our planet is going darker on top as it ages. That’s bad news for a couple of reasons — first, because it’s happening as a result of global warming, and second, because it will make global warming worse.
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Climate change has reduced ice in the Arctic to record lows in the past year, forcing animals to range further in search of food
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The bad news is that the terrible drought in New Mexico has led some farmers to sell their water to the oil and gas industry. The worse news is that many of them are actually pumping the water out of the aquifer to do so.
The worst news of all is that once the frackers get through tainting it with their witches’ brew of chemicals, that water often becomes unrecoverable — and then we have the possibility the used fracking water will end up contaminating even more of the groundwater.
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Finance
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Opposition is growing to the idea of President Obama naming Larry Summers to head the Federal Reserve. As William Greider wrote in The Nation, “Summers is a toxic retread from the old boys’ network and a nettlesome egotist who offended just about everyone during his previous tours in government. More to the point, Summers was a central player in the grave governing errors that led to the financial collapse and a ruined economy.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is running a secretive, multi-million dollar slush fund that finances lavish trips for state legislators and has misled the Internal Revenue Service about the fund’s activity, two government watchdog groups charged today.
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One week after it was first reported that talk radio giant Cumulus Media might cut ties with Rush Limbaugh and pull his show from 40 of its stations nationwide, the end result of the contractual showdown remains unclear. But we do know this: The damage has been done to Limbaugh and his reputation inside the world of AM radio as an untouchable star.
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At the height of the Occupy Movement the support for these mostly young people was considerable. They were attacking the 1% and speaking out for all workers. Here in Oakland I remember being on the back of a flatbed truck about to speak on the day of the big strike that shut down three shifts at the port of Oakland and felt a tug at my ankle. It was my former boss.
As I looked out in to the crowd, some estimates put at 30 to 40 thousand I saw co-workers and management personnel who I never see at events like these. People have had enough. Thousands of decent jobs lost, people thrown out of their homes in to the street, poor people cut off from public assistance and those protesting the shutting down of fire stations in their neighborhoods or the state parks where they took their families for the only affordable vacation around, were there looking for some solution to this crisis that is being shifted on to the shoulders of workers and the middle class. And this, after we bailed out the bankers and dragged their system from the edge of the abyss. Older people, the disabled, youth, a Lucky Stores worker earning $21 an hour after more than 40 years on the job described how powerful the feeling was to be there that day and shut down the docks.
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Privacy
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The intelligence community has been harping on the word “metadata” to try to underscore that the information they collected is not quite “data”, is not subject to the same limits, and is not quite as bad. I want to put an end to this charade, by way of an analogy.
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Former spy-agency contractor Edward Snowden has caused a fierce debate over civil liberties and national-security needs by disclosing details of secret U.S. government surveillance programmes.
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Documents obtained by Reuters have revealed that the US Drug Enforcement Administration has a secretive unit assigned to conducting unconstitutional surveillance techniques and transmitting the information to agencies across the country to aid in criminal investigations.
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On Monday, Reuters reported on previously undisclosed documents showing that a secret Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) unit uses information collected by intelligence agencies—including the National Security Agency (NSA)—to build evidence for criminal cases. The true origin of this information is usually concealed from defense lawyers—and sometimes even prosecutors and judges—to seemingly do an end-run around the normal court procedures for a criminal defendant’s right to discovery.
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A day after a New York Times story broke on the intense jockeying for NSA intelligence from various agencies within the federal government, Reuters has published an explosive report on the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and its collaboration with the NSA and other agencies providing intelligence.
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No apocryphal levity this week. Instead, a sombre look into an almost-present future. For once, Tim Cook isn’t holding his cards close to his chest; he makes no secret of Apple’s interest in wearable technologies. Among the avenues for notable growth (in multiples of $10bn), I think wearable devices are a good fit for Apple, more than the likable but just-for-hobbyist TV, and certainly more than the cloudy automotive domain where Google Maps could be a hard obstacle.
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GenieDB has launched a MySQL distributed database service to manage data across multiple regions and cloud providers, making it suited to companies with concerns about the NSA having access to their data.
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Members of Congress have complained that they have been repeatedly rebuffed when trying to get the most basic information about the activities of the National Security Agency and the secret court that oversees its activities.
Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that at least two members of Congress feel that they haven’t received adequate information about the NSA’s most basic activities.
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Two Congressmen, Republican Representative of Virginia Morgan Griffith and Democratic Representative of Florida Alan Grayson, have told The Guardian that despite their repeat requests for details of the NSA’s Prism programme, the US Intelligence Committee has refused to provide them with any information.
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In late July, Rep. Justin Amash proposed an amendment to the annual Defense spending bill that would prevent the NSA from targeting anybody not currently under an investigation. Unsurprisingly, the amendment was voted down. Now one Senator is trying the same thing in the Senate, but his attempt might be more successful.
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Washington moves quickly. Some 22 embassies are ‘closed’.
Within hours senators are defending the National Security Agency’s highly controversial programmes for intercepting, that means bugging of some kind, of emails and phones across the US and the rest of the world.
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The US government’s efforts to recruit talented hackers could suffer from the recent revelations about its vast domestic surveillance programs, as many private researchers express disillusionment with the National Security Agency.
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The German secret service must explain why it handed over metadata to the NSA, a minister has said. Germany’s government claimed it was ignorant of the activity of the secret service, which was described as being “in bed with the US” by Edward Snowden.
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When General Michael Hayden sat down to tape Fox News Sunday, he blinked quickly and acknowledged Chris Wallace’s introduction. Then, in response to Wallace’s third question, he proceeded to tell a huge whopper, without ever losing eye contact with the camera and the audience. That would be us.
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On August 5, Reuters revealed that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is storing wiretaps and other intelligence intercepts, some of which it obtains from the NSA, in a massive database called DICE. The agency then uses DICE to launch investigations against drug and arms smugglers.
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In a nationwide show that they care about their constitutional rights and are willing to take a stand for them, hundreds of Americans gathered in over a dozen US cities on Sunday, to protest against US government surveillance programs.
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Former spy-agency contractor Edward Snowden has caused a fierce debate over civil liberties and national security needs by disclosing details of secret U.S. government surveillance programs.
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JavaScript attack had a hard-coded IP address that traced back to NSA address block.
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The NYPD did not respond to questions regarding whether it had received intelligence from the Special Operations Division.
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Documents reveal how two Congress members were refused requests for information on NSA dragnets
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm have compiled an extensive list of things to demand from NSA reform legislation, from obvious things like ending bulk collection to crucial legal subtleties like fixing the problem of standing in cases regarding surveillance.
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Following a wave of polls showing a remarkable turn of public opinion, Congress has finally gotten serious about bringing limits, transparency and oversight to the NSA’s mass surveillance apparatus aimed at Americans.
While we still believe that the best first step is a modern Church Committee, an independent, public investigation and accounting of the government’s surveillance programs that affect Americans, members of Congress seem determined to try to enact fixes now. Almost a dozen bills have already been introduced or will be introduced in the coming weeks.
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Following Snowden’s release of classified data from CIA and NSA, blowing the whistle on various government programs that spied on citizens; many big Internet firms have admitted that they were helping the intelligence agencies by providing personal data and private information regarding conversations and correspondence via email or even texting.
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HTTPS is the secure version of the most popular Internet exchange protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
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Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service is said to have forwarded massive amounts of data to the NSA – legally, it maintains – because information on German citizens was not included. Opposition parties are outraged.
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The Guardian’s NSA files have awakened many a curiosity about the actual technological capacity of the government. What it does do is a most important question; what it can do is only slightly less germane.
Still, there’s a lot we don’t know about some basic questions. For example, is it true, as Edward Snowden boasted, that an analyst can “wiretap” anyone simply because he or she chooses to do so?
Here’s the basic gist of an answer:
The NSA has the capability to wiretap anyone it targets. It does not have the immediate capability to target Americans at will, but it does have the capability to change capabilities — to a point — to allow it to actually wiretap any American at will.
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There was a big cyber attack on anonymous online network Tor over the weekend that led to the bust of an alleged child pornography “facilitator” by the FBI.
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A visiting US expert on terrorism says it is hard to imagine al Qaeda training anyone in New Zealand. Glenn Carle, who was the CIA’s former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats, is visiting New Zealand as part of a book tour and was referring to recent justifications for the GCSB bill by the Prime Minister.
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Sources told CNN more than 20 CIA agents were at or near the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, when Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed.
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A mind-blowing detail has emerged from the internal correspondence of NGO Save the Children disclosing its infiltration into the Abbottabad Commission to save its skin following allegations of the CIA’s penetration into the NGO in a hunt for Osama bin Laden through Dr Shakil Afridi, now under arrest in Peshawar.
“Some of us suspected that the khakis had access to the record and receive daily updates but never realised an NGO had infiltrated too,” said an official privy to the Commission’s working.
The leaked communication indicates that Lt Gen (retd) Nadeem Ahmed, an unofficial representative of the Army and ISI in the Commission, was allegedly cultivated by Save the Children who would offer him ‘how-to-do’ bailout advice, even sharing details about the internal politics of the Commission and classified record, something in radical contradiction to his reputation as a thorough professional and a man of integrity.
He briefed the deputy country director of Save the Children, according to the email, about the views of different members, staunch opposition from a panel colleague, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, resulting in his dissenting note on the NGO and other institutions, and Gen (retd) Nadeem’s plan to effectively counter this note in collaboration with Justice (R) Javed Iqbal, the Chairman.
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A field investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has uncovered fresh evidence that the CIA briefly resumed targeting first responders to drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas with ‘double-tap’ attacks.
The Bureau, a non-profit, non-partisan, London-based news organization, first reported that the US deliberately targeted first responders attempting to rescue drone strike victims with follow-up attacks, called ‘double-tap’ strikes, in February 2012. In addition to targeting rescuers, CIA drones also attacked people attending funerals of suspected militants killed by US forces.
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Venezuelan officials warned of an alleged plot to assassinate the country’s President and launch a paramilitary invasion of the country. A former CIA agent, Cuban exiles living in the US and Latin American leaders were fingered in the conspiracy
President Nicolas Maduro, who succeeded Hugo Chavez, first alleged that his enemies want him dead while on the campaign trail in April.
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The CIA inflated the case of a kidnapped Egyptian cleric in order to protect high-ranked government officials from prosecution in Italy, a former intelligence agent admits for the first time.
Sabrina De Sousa, 55, has long denied involvement with the CIA, and even asked the United States for immunity after she was charged by Italian officials for the 2003 “extraordinary rendition” of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. But a decade after that kidnapping, the case has reemerged in recent days upon news that her former CIA boss in Milan was captured in Panama, only to be sent back to the US in lieu of what would have likely turned into an extradition request from Italy.
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The CIA is seeking to reduce the number of its Afghanistan bases of operation from a dozen to as few as six over two years, going with the overall American withdrawal. But even after 2014, it will maintain a significant footprint.
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Two US drone strikes killed four suspected al-Qaeda terrorists Tuesday morning in Yemen’s Mareb province.
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The Obama administration has announced it will keep 19 diplomatic posts in North Africa and the Middle East closed for up to a week, due to fears of a possible militant threat. On Sunday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the decision to close the embassies was based on information collected by the National Security Agency. “If we did not have these programs, we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys,” Chambliss said, in a direct reference to increasing debate over widespread spying of all Americans revealed by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. “Nobody has ever questioned or disputed that the U.S. government, like all governments around the world, ought to be eavesdropping and monitoring the conversations of people who pose an actual threat to the United States in terms of plotting terrorist attacks,” Greenwald says.
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Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.
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The IP address hardcoded into the 0-day Firefox javascript, used to compromise the Tor network via a version of Tor bundle has been traced back to Science Applications International Corp (a company investigated by Blue Cabinet) which has worked with former Edward Snowden employer Booz Allen Hamilton, is an NSA contractor, has supplied communications technology to the Assad regime, and also developed a tool for the NSA called – wait for it – PRISM.
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All told, the poll found support ranged from a low of 16 percent (for a program collecting the content of U.S. communications without any mention of court approval or anti-terrorism efforts) to a high of 41 percent (if the government gathered metadata with court approval as part of anti-terrorism efforts).
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With concern rising high over the intrusion wrought by the National Security Agency, with the emails and telephone calls of U.S. citizens being recorded, the low-profile U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit has been up to similar tactics.
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The greatest threats to peace of mind and security remain, not stateless agents fumbling over dirty bombs and vicious rhetoric, but States and State agencies. Being mindful of their errors, and being concerned over their infractions, should be at the forefront of our minds. Besides, the idea of a terrorist threat is like Freudian subconsciousness: almost always unprovable.
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Even if the weekend’s intelligence warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks in the Middle East came from electronic eavesdropping abroad by the National Security Agency, that would not ease congressional opposition to the NSA’s mass collection of domestic phone records, lawmakers from both parties said Monday.
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A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
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One of Silicon Valley’s most respected technology experts, Steve Blank, says he would be “surprised” if the US National Security Agency was not embedding “back doors” inside chips produced by Intel and AMD, two of the world’s largest semiconductor firms, giving them the possibility to access and control machines.
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Our report on private investigators, published earlier this year, highlighted the growing use of the industry by public authorities, with particular concern being raised about the occasions that they were used without RIPA authorisation.
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Following a wave of polls showing a remarkable turn of public opinion, Congress has finally gotten serious about bringing limits, transparency and oversight to the NSA’s mass surveillance apparatus aimed at Americans.
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…funnel me information on a daily basis about where the fish are located.
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Michael Hayden, who also headed the CIA, speculates on global hacker response if Edward Snowden brought back to US
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The little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created in 2007 on a 9/11 Commission recommendation, was limping along for years with no appointees or staff leadership. All that changed with this summer’s revelations of domestic surveillance of Americans’ telephone activity by the National Security Agency.
The board — an independent agency that consists of four part-time members and a full-time chair who advise the president and Congress on the balance between security and privacy — this month will finally welcome its first executive director, attorney Sharon Bradford Franklin. That’s after it took more than two years for President Obama to nominate and for the Senate to approve the board members—Chairman David Medine was just confirmed in May.
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Are Microsoft & Google arms of the State?
What we’re witnessing is the revelation that big-name Corporate America (and Corporate Elsewhere as well) has been folded into the U.S. government (the State) since at least 2007, though my guess is that this has been going on slowly for a long time.
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It’s not unusual to come across a report in the New York Times that reeks of government oversight — a report that should have some kind of reader health warning such as: “The U.S. government approves this message.”
[...]
This is clearly such a self-serving narrative for the NSA, one has to wonder: who initiated the report? The New York Times or the NSA?
My first response when reading this was to simply think: spare me the bullshit about the choir boys who run the NSA.
Rather than post a clip here and bother explaining why it stank, it seemed better ignored.
But then an exclusive report from Reuters appeared — a report revealing that in blatant disregard for the United States Constitution, the NSA does indeed provide law enforcement agencies with intelligence intercepts.
That the Reuters report would come out within hours of the New York Times report could be a stunning coincidence, but if you believe that you probably also believe that NSA chief Keith Alexander and DNI James Clapper would never lie.
That government officials spoon-feed stories to press stenographers is not exactly news. However, the “coincidence” of these two reports does suggest an additional and more disturbing explanation about how the NSA is able to play the media: through surveillance of journalists as they are gathering information for news reports.
Why would the NSA not regard reporting about the NSA as raising national security concerns? Indeed, what better way could there be of tracking down leakers than by keeping a close eye on the relatively small number of journalists who are likely to be contacted by any would-be whistle-blower?
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The revelations of mass online spying by US government agencies that involved cooperation from the British and the German governments and intelligence services, as well as the upcoming elections have forced the German government to try to match the indignation of the country’s citizens with some action.
A few days ago they symbolically called off the Cold War-era surveillance pact with the US and Britain, and now German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger is calling for EU-wide punitive measures to be introduced for corporations that have been found participating in the US spying activities.
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PBS Newshour recently featured an interview with NSA whistleblower/GAP client Bill Binney and a clip from the GAP conference, “Whistleblowers, Journalists, and the New War Within.” Also interviewed was fellow NSA whistleblower Russ Tice, and former NSA Inspector General Joel Brenner, who challenges both Binney and Tice. The whistleblowers discuss, among other things, how their suspicions of the agency’s data collection activities have grown to match the full scale operation that the American public is learning about today.
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In a troubling vindication for the cynics, it seems government officials in Washington are celebrating the recent announcement of a terror threat to US interests around the world as a happy distraction from the NSA spying scandal.
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It’s outrageous, the Times suggests, that Chambliss would raise this point, because “No one has questioned the N.S.A.’s role in collecting intelligence overseas, but the debate is about domestic efforts to vacuum up large volumes of data on the phone calls of every American that are legally questionable and needlessly violate Americans’ rights.”
I’m not making that last quotation up.
Nobody has questioned the N.S.A.’s role in collecting intelligence overseas?
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According to the NYT report, several government agencies have complained that the NSA and the FBI shut them out of any data they collect. The NSA has refused these requests from other agencies due to “legal constraints” and “privacy concerns.”
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The primary defense of the necessity of the US National Security Agency’s broad spying powers—including, apparently, recording pretty much everything anyone anywhere is doing on the internet—is that its activities are necessary to protect against terrorists and violent criminals. But a report published Saturday in the New York Times indicates that federal agencies with far more mundane mandates are unable to resist the lure of the NSA’s vast trove of data.
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A day after we learned of a draining turf battle between the NSA and other law enforcement agencies over bulk surveillance data, it now appears that those same agencies are working together to cover up when those data get shared.
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The closing of U.S. embassies in 21 predominantly Muslim countries and a broad caution about travel during August that the State Department issued on Friday touched off debate Sunday over the National Security Agency’s sweeping data collection programs.
Congressional supporters of the program, appearing on Sunday morning talk shows, said the latest rounds of warnings of unspecified threats showed that the programs were necessary, while detractors said there was no evidence linking the programs, particularly the massive collection of cell phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, to the vague warnings of a possible terrorist attack.
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Following the controversy stirred up by ex-intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, who leaked info about mass surveillance programs to the media, new info surfaces about a top secret NSA program called XKeyscore that monitors “nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet.”
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Americans are just beginning to discover that a secret court has been 1 to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. They are also learning that this court is made up primarily of conservative activists from the Republican Party who have no respect for the original intent of the Constitution’s framers.
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Imagine a government that spies on its citizens, often without warrants.
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This is not what a democratic government is supposed to do. Decisions about use of government authority to maintain national security should be debated in an open and transparent fashion. The government should be required in open court subject to public scrutiny to justify why it needs to monitor communications among its citizens, demonstrating that it has met the constitutional burden of particularized suspicion. This is what Americans fought a war of independence for, and it is supposedly what separates the United States from undemocratic countries. Limiting discretion to protect rights is what the law is supposed to do, it is why the law matters.
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The NSA, GCHQ, Frenchelon and their counterparts in other countries are spying on every detail of our online lives. Even the once-private lands of Tor are no longer safe. Here in the UK, David Cameron wants our ISPs to start filtering our web content to protect our innocent minds.
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The Justice Department says it is reviewing the Drug Enforcement Administration’s “Special Operations Division”—the subject of an explosive report published by Reuters on Monday. The SOD works to funnel information collected by American intelligence agencies to ordinary narcotics cops—then instructs them to “phony up investigations,” as one former judge quoted in the story put it, in order to conceal the true source of the information. In some instances, this apparently involves not only lying to defense attorneys, but to prosecutors and judges as well.
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Premier hacker conference Def Con, which just wrapped up its 21st year, played host to security professionals who all had very different opinions on what the NSA is up to. In fact, the only thing everyone could agree on is that the PRISM revelations came as no surprise.
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Malware used to identify Tor users contacted an IP address owned by US government agency, researchers claim
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Civil Rights
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Government bodies at the local level can step into the fray. Counties and cities can refuse to assist any federal attempts at indefinite detention in their jurisdictions. These measures will not only provide practical protections for their citizens, they will send a strong message to Columbus.
When you build a network of support from the ground up, it will create a strong mechanism to demand that your state legislature will do the same. One step, and one community at a time, you can nullify indefinite detention.
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VALENTIN CRISTEA , an 83-year-old engineer living in the tiny Romanian town of Comarnic, will never forget a day more than 55 years ago. On February 8th 1956, he was arrested by the Securitate, Romania’s notorious secret police, because he was accused of links with an anti-Communist resistance group. He was sentenced to five years in prison for disclosure of state secrets and jailed at the Râmnicu Sărat prison.
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From July 26th to 29th, Management at Mobile Rail Solutions fired three workers actively engaged in unionizing efforts. The termination of these organizers is a direct attack on their Union drive and apparent retaliation for their recent OSHA filings. Management then threatened to continue firing workers showing no respect for their employees or labor law.
In response, the workers have self-organized a strike and will be picketing at Union Pacific’s Global 1 location in Chicago, Illinois. They demand a meeting with Mobile Rail’s general manager to discuss the recent wave of Unfair Labor Practices and for the reinstatement of their three fired workers. With most workers coming to the picket line, they expect locomotive servicing will come to a halt.
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I’ll start by saying that anyone reading the awful comments made towards these people will agree that they are appalling, unacceptable and have no place at all in any sort of reasoned debate/world. I’ll also say that in respect of the issue that caused this (more females appearing on bank notes) I fully supported this campaign at the time, I think notable women from history should have been on UK bank notes years ago without the need for a campaign to get the ball rolling – And if any of these Twitter abusers want to send threatening comments to me, please do so, we can all have a laugh at your expense.
And this is what the article is about. Laughing. Laughing at the commenter’s who made such disgusting remarks. Perhaps the one issue of this story which sticks in my throat though is the fact that this has been going on for years. I’ve had my wife threatened (via the comments section on this very blog) I’ve had accusations and insults thrown at me and even now, Microsoft Advocates that are anonymous on Usenet still abuse/insult myself and others – the reason? We support and champion an alternative to Microsoft. Want to see what these “people” get up to? Check out the last 15 or so years of posts on comp.os.linux.advocacy by posters such as “Flatfish”, “DFS”, “Cola Zealot”, “Hadron” to name a few. These people have spent around 15 years abusing regulars of that group under those and many other nyms – the “crime”? to dare to suggest that there may be better alternatives to Microsoft products. – I’ve never considered taking these issues to the police. Why? Because I am an adult and can handle it myself.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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To its credit (and I can’t believe I’m saying that), it appears that the NSA has rejected most of these requests, saying that those other issues are not high enough of a priority and they don’t want to violate privacy rights (don’t laugh). Still, given how much pressure is coming from other agencies of the government, you have to expect that sooner or later the NSA will be pressured into opening up the data to other parts of the government. In fact, part of the concern about CISPA and other cybsersecurity legislation wasn’t just that it would put the NSA in control over such information, but that it also made it clear that government agencies would be free to share that data with each other, for almost any investigative purpose.
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We’ve been working our way through a paper released last week by the Commerce Department, concerning copyright reform, and will have a much more detailed post about it soon (there’s a lot in there), but over at the Washington Post, they’re highlighting the silly recommendation to bring back the plan to make unauthorized streaming a felony. This was a part of SOPA and was widely discussed. It wasn’t technically in PIPA, but there was something of a “companion” bill from Senator Amy Klobuchar that effectively had the same thing. This got a fair amount of attention when Justin Bieber was asked about the law, and said that Klobuchar should be locked up.
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You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony.
As it stands now, streaming a copyrighted work over the Internet is considered a violation of the public performance right. The violation is only punishable as a misdemeanor, rather than the felony charges that accompany the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material.
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08.05.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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With the end of the month comes our recap of the major Linux happenings for the past 31 days with our enthusiast, graphics, and hardware bent on the open-source operating system.
For the month of July 2013 on Phoronix there were 258 original news stories (an average of over eight articles per day) and 29 original featured-length articles (one per day). Nearly all of these articles were written by your’s truly, including in the rush at the end of the month where just yesterday were 12 news postings and three featured articles. Even today there were 11 mews postings and two featured articles; there’s no one else as prolifically writing as much about Linux on a constant basis.
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American chip giant Intel is looking to establish itself in Sweden. A southern town called Lund will be the home of about 50 new Intel employees – and now for the surprising part – they’re ex ST-Ericsson employees.
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Desktop
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I’m Nathan Schneider, a writer and editor. I write for publications like Harper’s and The Nation and The Chronicle of Higher Education and co-edit an online literary journal on religion and a site for daily news and analysis on resistance movements (I also manage the back-end for both). I’ve written two books, one on debates about the existence of God and one on Occupy Wall Street.
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Server
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The cost of supercomputers is less expensive due to the availability of open source Linux OS. SUSE is offering enterprise class server operating system in Linux. SUSE Linux enterprise server OS is used by more than one third of the top hundred supercomputers in the world. SUSE says in past few years there are significant changes in high performance computing due to open source and new clustering technologies. The cost of supercomputers is coming down due to availability of low-cost hardware and Linux OS. Computing power of supercomputers is increased 1000X from fast few years which enables even mid-size organizations to have a supercomputer equivalent server on a commodity type hardware. SUSE says it leads in this domain by offering scalable, flexible architecture which can handle large number of CPUs.
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Big Blue wants a much bigger piece of the $10 billion annual Linux server business, and it is rolling out a fatter version of its Power7+ server lineup in the PowerLinux line to chase big Java, database, and analytics workloads. The new machine, called the PowerLinux 7R4, is a Linux-only version of the four-socket Power 750+ server that was announced back in February along with a revamped entry Power7+ server line and an even fatter Power 760+ machine.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Using the latest ZFS On Linux support, the ZFS file-system was benchmarked from the Linux 3.10 stable kernel and compared to the Linux file-system competition.
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A power capping framework has been proposed for the mainline Linux kernel to provide some standard interfaces for the increasing amount of drivers/hardware that support power monitoring and limiting.
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As I’ve discussed in the past, I will be selecting one “longterm stable” kernel release every year, and maintain that kernel release for at least two years.
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All a Linux distribution really needs is any version of the Linux kernel that fits its needs. Linux businesses, like Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE need more. When they build commercial Linux distributions they need to know that the base Linux kernel will have long-term support. That’s just what Linux Foundation fellow and leading Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman is giving them.
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It’s time for another Sunday release of the Linux kernel. While it’s out on schedule, the Linux 3.11-rc4 release carries about the same amount of changes as 3.11-rc3, which isn’t making Linus Torvalds happy.
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Nearing the end of the Linux 3.11 kernel with most (if not all) of the interesting pull requests merged, here’s a look at the exciting features that will premiere in this next Linux kernel release.
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Graphics Stack
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While DRI2 PRIME has led to Optimus-like support for laptops with NVIDIA/Intel GPU combinations, one of the problems making this technology less beneficial is the lack of dynamic power management handling. What’s the point of keeping one GPU fed with power when it’s being unused and just lowering your battery life? Fortunately, a fix is ahead.
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While the Mesa 9.2 release is right around the corner, Mesa 9.1.6 was released on Thursday to ship various bug-fixes for the major open-source Linux graphics drivers.
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While this week we published benchmarks that showed how NVIDIA’s Linux driver can compete with Windows 8 — when using the closed-source drivers and not the open-source Nouveau solution — and that even the FreeBSD NVIDIA performance is competitive, this isn’t the case for AMD’s drivers. From the same Core i7 Haswell system as used for the NVIDIA testing, AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested on Windows 8 and Linux. It wasn’t a surprise that the open-source Radeon Gallium3D was much slower than Catalyst, but took us off guard a bit was that the Linux Catalyst driver does take some noticeable performance hits over the Microsoft Windows driver in some OpenGL workloads.
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Another week, another xf86-video-intel graphics driver update. This latest xf86-video-intel DDX driver update brings performing tuning for the Haswell GT3e graphics core, disables triple buffering for compositors, and other changes.
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The graphics subsystem on Linux is undergoing change. The X Window System is 30 years old and showing its age. Richard Hillesley tells some of the story of X and its replacements…
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Cross-device synchronization support for DMA-BUF is still being worked on for a future Linux kernel release.
This feature comes down to synchronizing the rendering of multiple devices via DMA-BUF, the buffer sharing mechanism introduced in the Linux kernel for sharing graphics buffers between DRM drivers and other related drivers in the context of ARM SoCs.
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Aside from the progressing PRIME support for Wayland, more good news today for this X.Org Foundation backed project is RealVNC expressing interest in supporting Wayland for their remote desktop software.
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The AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta driver was released today and with it comes full support for OpenGL 4.3, support for the Linux 3.10 kernel, and various fixes.
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Another week, another xf86-video-intel graphics driver update. This latest xf86-video-intel DDX driver update brings performing tuning for the Haswell GT3e graphics core, disables triple buffering for compositors, and other changes.
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Benchmarks
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Using the latest ZFS On Linux support, the ZFS file-system was benchmarked from the Linux 3.10 stable kernel and compared to the Linux file-system competition.
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Applications
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Any Linux user will tell you that a good text editor is a vital component of a computer system, no matter if you’re a new user or a seasoned pro. While using a Terminal text editor (like nano or vim) is equally important, you might as well make use of your graphical desktop environment whenever it’s available to you.
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Transmission is a must for those looking for a simple and efficient BitTorrent client for convenient everyday use, especially for lovers of downloading free music and software.
The BitTorrent protocol is increasingly used, and sometimes almost indispensable, for example on a site of free music (http://www.jamendo.com/) is the official protocol, there are a few free clients such as Transmission. It is an open source, cross-platform, volunteer-based project.
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VLC Media Player 2.0.8 has been released. This is a maintenance release that fixes some regressions in the 2.0.x branch. There are also numerous fixes for crashes, dangerous behaviors, ISDB-S tuning and some OS X issues were resolved.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Creating a new image for a certain embedded device is a boring process that can take a lot of time. For some time I’ve been working with MIC that is a rather easy to use tool for image creation.
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Games
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DeCalc is a puzzle game that makes math fun! It’s like reversed calculator – you get a result and your job is to arrange the buttons so when pressed in given order, you get that result. There are several twists and rules that enrich the puzzles as well.
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MouseCraft is a puzzle game where players help mice in their relentless quest for cheese by stacking world’s most famous blocks: Tetrominos.
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While Fez 2 has recently been cancelled by developer Phil Fish, Polytron’s producer Marie-Christine Bourdua has confirmed to Joystiq that the studio is still working with Sony on an upcoming project. Bourdua also confirmed that indie-hit Fez will be getting ported to Mac and Linux.
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The Fullbright Company, a team founded by the folks who worked on the Minerva’s Den downloadable content for BioShock 2, announced today that they will be releasing their first game as an independent company called Gone Home – slated to be released on August 15th.
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The game’s first patch released over the weekend, and is available automatically through Steam or via a repeat download for DRM-free purchasers. The patch notes reveal a collection of bug fixes but also plenty of balancing – various firearm skills now use less ammunition, for example.
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Welcome to your second instalment of the GOL Craft Weekly, covering what’s been happening on our Minecraft server which is ever growing.
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Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition was released to Windows games earlier in the year and features the classic Duke Nukem 3D game plus three expansion packs. Megaton Edition features visual enhancements, SteamPlay support, and other improvements over the original games.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I spend a lot of time with my face directed at my computer screen. Most of the time, I’m even looking at the screen and actively typing or reading. To help me stay focussed, I took a lesson from GNOME 3 book, then turbocharged it for own KDE setup: there is nothing on my desktop, my panel hides itself automatically, and I use the dashboard extensively. This way, most things won’t distract me unless I was already thinking about them.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This year’s gearheads’ meetup was in Bilbao which is located in the Basque Country in Spain. The talks were very good and gave a good idea of whats going around in the Qt and KDE worlds. There were people taking Qt to new platforms and others getting your contacts more organized.
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Last week I reported that KWin compiles and links against Qt 5 and KF 5. This week I’m glad to report that I got KWin also to run. The biggest issue was a PEBKAC – if you try to run anything build against frameworks make sure to not have KDE 4 libraries in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
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In recent versions of Dolphin, the view sometimes looked like this just after entering a directory.
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We’ve been asked many times how to contribute to Kubuntu financially so we are now open for donations. Your donations will help finance project expenses such as hardware, travel and cloud computing.
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We are happy to announce the 1.1 Beta release for Plasma Media Center (PMC). The first release of the software received a lot of appreciation and feedback, some of which have been implemented in this release. If you find yourself using your computer (a laptop, a tablet, or a computer connected to a big display) for listening to music or watching your favorite videos and photos, you should definitely try PMC
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I’m currently sitting on a plane to a family trip. My bag contains about 8 pounds worth of hardware along these formfactors, though some of that is through accidental overpacking. I’ve been looking for ways to solve this problem without sacrificing my productivity, for quite a while. Carrying this much tech is unnecessary and it makes travel, even locally on transit, a literal pain in the neck. Some people are able to rock iPads with bluetooth keyboards and get their dayjobs done. I’ve had issues with this workflow as a developer; it’s worked to some extent when I was on an OS with decent multitasking, but it left me wanting — no easy way to debug web sites in-browser was the biggest show-stopper, there were some other things though.
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The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of commits which provide new features, polishing of the user interaction and bug fixes.
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Only 5 months after we released Krita 2.6, we release Krita 2.7 today! There are a lot of cool new features, bug fixes and improvements. Soon to come to a Linux distribution near you.
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The release of Qt 5.0 brought to an end the first opportunity in 7 years to break source and binary compatibility for a Qt release. It was a huge effort from across all disciplines and contributions, from design discussions, documentation and development to infrastructure, administration, marketing, testing and packaging.
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Plasma Media Center 1.1, the second release to this KDE multimedia project providing a nice shell for multimedia needs, is now available in beta form. Plasma Media Center 1.1 is set to bring several new features to this KDE component for music and video playback.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The temperature rose once again in Brno today. Thirsty hackers were seen sheltering in the shade, while the local conference team shipped in extra water for all the participants.
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the latest development update before our planned freezes and beta release for GNOME 3.1o is finally available.
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For your visual pleasure, here are some fresh screenshots from GNOME 3.9.5. Enjoy
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The third development version of the upcoming PyGObject 3.10 library, for the GNOME 3.10 desktop environment, was announced a few days ago, bringing assorted fixes and improvements.
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GNOME 3.9.5 has been released as the latest development release leading up to the GNOME 3.10 debut in September.
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GNOME has two new components for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 release: Maps and Geoclue2. These two GNOME packages saw their first official releases this week.
Geoclue2 was announced on Wednesday as a rewrite of Geoclue. Geoclue2 is intended to support GPS receivers, 3G modems, WiFi-based positioning, and IP address geolocation in order to provide geolocation support. Over the original Geoclue, the Geoclue2 component provides a single D-Bus service to abstract the different geolocation back-ends and also gives the end-user controls over what applications can access their location data.
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I used and reviewed OS4 13 (LTS version) earlier as well. But, I didn’t find it appealing earlier. The default design of XFCE looks way better than the legacy BeOS design of OS4. I checked out the 13.1 version earlier and was not that pleased with OS4. However, my opinion changed with the release OS4 13.6 (I missed out the other updates after 13.1, honestly). With a change in design, interesting applications pre-installed in the distro and a more refined interface, OS4 13.6 OpenLinux suddenly seems more attractive.
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New Releases
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Today, August 3, David Tavares has just announce the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Alpha release of the upcoming Pear OS 8 Linux operating system.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Arch Family
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alphaOS, a distribution based on Puppy Linux and built from Arch Linux packages, has just reached version 9.0 (20130801).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) Director Jeff Clarke unloaded 3,829 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Thursday, August 1st. The shares were sold at an average price of $52.56, for a total transaction of $201,252.24. Following the completion of the sale, the director now directly owns 5,062 shares of the company’s stock. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the SEC, which is available at this link.
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Debian Family
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Last week, evolution caught up with the Ubuntu juggernaut. After jerking people around with Unity, WaylandMir, and generally annoying lovers of Free Software with top-down stuff, Canonical drove more people to take a look at installing Debian GNU/Linux as suggested by the page-hit ratings on Distrowatch. That puts Debian GNU/Linux in #2 after Mint.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A ‘Early Alpha’ of Unity 8 is available to install and test in Ubuntu 13.10 from today – just don’t expect too much from it quite yet.
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The appearance of Nautilus, System Settings and several other GNOME 3 applications in Ubuntu 13.10 has been improved in a recent update.
A regression in Ubuntu’s default themes, present since Ubuntu 13.04, that has seen GTK+ 3 applications lack correctly coloured toolbars has finally been corrected.
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Is the Ubuntu Edge, the Linux-powered “superphone” that Canonical hopes to develop through a crowdsourced funding campaign, a dying prospect? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the project hasn’t already succeeded in significantly advancing Canonical’s goals in the smartphone and mobile-device market. Here’s why.
The Indiegogo fundraising campaign for the Edge is only in its second week, but bloggers are already loudly proclaiming its impending failure. And despite the positive spin that some writers, including Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, are putting on the endeavor, the naysayers may well turn out to be right. Contributions to the Ubuntu Edge fundraiser, which now total about $7.8 million of the $32 million goal, have slowed to a trickle. Giving needs to rebound hugely if Canonical hopes to meet its goal before the fundraiser ends on Aug. 21.
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This week the project has progress quite a lot. To start with, I’ve finally made the case handle. This was done using a “Cobra weave” and used roughly 3 meters of purple paracord.
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At this time there will still be PowerPC images for Ubuntu Server, Lubuntu, and other flavors, but the official Ubuntu desktop flavor for PowerPC is likely to be eliminated by the end of the week, per this mailing list post.
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Flavours and Variants
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re you a Linux desktop user who loves Ubuntu but is wary of Unity? You’re in luck. There are lots of Ubuntu spins, both from Canonical and independent developers, which preserve the basic infrastructure and essence of Ubuntu but replace the default Unity desktop.
Canonical has been producing official spins since its second release, but they have been getting more attention since Ubuntu switched to Unity. The oldest, and one of the most popular, is Kubuntu, which offers the KDE desktop; if you want Ubuntu goodness on an underpowered computer, there’s the lightweight Lubuntu; and starting with the 13.04 Raring Ringtail release, users will also be able to use the Gnome desktop thanks to the new Ubuntu Gnome spin.
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Network World – The crafters of the LinuxMint distro are in a ticklish position. Mint is based on Ubuntu, which in turn, is based on Debian, which in turn, has the moveable feast of the Linux kernel as its underpinning. All three have changed underneath LinuxMint, but LinuxMint 15 pulls off a new cut without missing a step (save a missing KDE version).
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Gumstix unveiled a major expansion of its Geppetto drag-and-drop custom embedded board design platform. In addition to supporting the design of custom baseboards for Gumstix’s Overo computer-on-modules, the browser-based service now lets customers create custom Linux-compatible SBCs based on the TI Sitara AM3354 SoC and receive assembled boards within three weeks.
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Cable operators could leave CableCard behind in their own hardware.
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Phones
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The Jolla Mobile developers that are in the midst of their first smart phone just updated their SDK to support Qt 5, Qt Quick 2, and Wayland.
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Quick notes on Q2 smartphone stuff. Sony reports Q2 quarter, smartphones (which all run Android, and Sony has completed its transition from dumbphones to smartphones) generated strong profits, grew unit sales 19% to 9.6 Million. I get prelim market share for Sony at 4.1%. Very good performance.
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Ballnux
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Samsung is reportedly bringing back the flip phone, adding Android and a pair of 3.7-inch touch screens to a form factor popular in the first GSM phones of the mid-1990s.
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Android
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The last time Google visited Jelly Bean’s user saturation numbers, it took the combined efforts of 4.1 and 4.2 to edge out Gingerbread’s (v2.3.3 through 2.3.7) hold on the user base. Not anymore; the latest numbers from the Android Dashboard show the base version of Jelly Bean, Android 4.1, representing 34 percent of the active devices — singlehandedly surpassing the old guard’s 33 percent share of the market. When combined with the rest of the Jelly Bean contingent (Android 4.2 and above), Google’s latest flavor of Android crushes Gingerbread with a 40.5 percent majority.
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Installing an Android app brings up a permissions prompt that most folks ignore (though they probably shouldn’t). But, what if you could grant applications access to some parts of your smartphone and not others?
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Behold the long-awaited Android 4.3 (a.k.a. Jelly Bean). Google Play is also finally getting textbooks.
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Google on Thursday unveiled the Moto X, a customizable smartphone that marks the tech giant’s first new phone since acquiring Motorola last year.
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The Moto X lowers the emphasis on manual control in favor of always-on sensors built to respond to speech, gestures, and context.
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I wonder, seeing the Thousands of Apps that are available for Android & iOS Devices utilized for Multi-Categorized uses like Utility, Development, Games, etc… and being an Linux System Administrator, I ever wonder if there will be a list of Apps designed especially for Linux System Administrators as well?
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Forgetful and unlucky Android phone and tablet owners will be happy to hear that their lost or stolen devices will now be trackable with a free service much like Apple’s “Find my iPhone.”
The Android Device Manager, announced by Google in a blog post Friday, will let you quickly locate your phone or tablet, whether it’s in the kitchen or at the bar you were hanging out at last night.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Small tablets are making big gains, while Apple is beginning to plateau, says market researcher Canalys.
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I put a little more work into running Zotero on Plasma Active tablets. First of all, it is now possible to install Zotero via zypper. You can get Zotero from my xulrunner branch repository on Mer OBS. Furthermore, it now comes with a .desktop file; so, you can start Zotero like any other application.
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The XO Tablet is an Android tablet from the folks behind the One Laptop per Child program. It’s designed for kids, has a semi-rugged removable case, and a custom suite of software with a focus on educational apps and games.
You can also run normal Android apps on the $149 tablet, but there are parental controls which let you restrict the apps your kids are using.
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PRISM was a wake-up call for many even though it is still not really clear how extensive the spying, logging and wiretapping really is. One reasonable approach to the issue is to move away from products of large companies such as Google, Microsoft or Apple as they have been linked to PRISM. But that is not really enough, considering that other companies too may cooperate with the NSA or other agencies, or may do so when they are approached.
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I wan’t to introduce a small side project of me today that we needed for ownCloud but could be useful for other too. It’s call CONTRIBOOK and I planed to do this for many years. Lately I was sitting in planes and trains a lot so I have some time to finally do the version 1.0 It’s a tool that can be used for community building and showing community activity as we wanted to do on ownCloud.org but it’s very generic and can be used by other open source projects tool.
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In February of this year, I reported that the Raleigh Public Record—a local, online news publication in Raleigh, NC—was in the process of creating an open source solution to extract data from PDFs. The problem many news journalists have is easily and quickly (which is very important given the nature of their job) converting data and images into a usable format from documents they use for their reports (see an example here).
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has been working hard on improving the Chromebook user experience. Quite a lot of development work is going on which can be access through beta and dev channels.
The beta channel for Chrome OS has been updated to 29.0.1537.41 (Platform version: 4319.52.0) for all Chrome OS devices. As usual this build contains a number of bug fixes, security updates and some exciting feature enhancement.
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Mozilla
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Today, Telefonica announced that the ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fire and ZTE Open devices will go on sale in Colombia and Venezuela. Both devices are now available through Movistar stores and sales channels. Telefonica also announced that Firefox OS devices will launch in Brazil in Q4.
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Several months after GeeksPhone developed two Firefox OS-based phones for the developer community, the Spanish smartphone startup is bringing Mozilla’s OS to consumers with the new Peak+ smartphone.
The Peak+ is now available for pre-order and follows the April debut of the Keon and Peak developer phones, both of which sold out within hours.
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South American Telefonica has announced two Firefox OS powered devices going on sale in Colombia and Venezuela. Alcatel One Touch Fire and ZTE Open are now available through Movistar stores and sales channels. Firefox OS based devices will be launched in Brazil in Q4.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced that the first Release Candidate version for LibreOffice 4.0.5 is now available for the Linux platform, bringing a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
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Part of this uncertainty or this difficulty that many Free and Open Source projects have when working with creative people, be it designers, artists or both, is that each operates and thinks along completely different line. While I could grasp that quite easily it is however necessary to understand what difference there is in how designers work and create compared to a set of more or less well defined contribution process of a software development project. My questions to the designer at La Fonderie ultimately led me to realize that the difference lies in the perception of what a contribution really is and the level of priority one gives to contribution’s formality. Let me explain.
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CMS
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The latest and greatest WordPress, version 3.6, named Oscar is released with a new blog-centric theme autosave and post locking options, native support for audio and video embeds and also improved integrations with SoundCloud, Rdio and Spotify.
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Great news for WordPress users. The version 3.6 aka Oscar has been released and it comes with some cool features including a beautiful new blog-centric theme, bullet-proof autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integrations with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Awk’s features have advanced considerably in the last decade — such as the addition of a debugger and a profiler — all without removing any of the elegance or terseness of the fabled little language.
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Project Releases
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Last week Andreas did an upstream release of the file synchronization software csync. Frequent readers know that csync is the sync engine that is used in the ownCloud client, so this is a very important and special release for us.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The House of Representatives has published all 51 titles of the U.S. Code in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format for download, as part of the leadership’s open government agenda. For developers and government watchdogs, it provides tools for rendering taggable, machine-readable versions of U.S. law.
Developers are already taking advantage of the release and building tools to facilitate the searching and rendering of the code. “Putting U.S. Code into XML doesn’t revolutionize the way legislators and citizens interact with the law yet, but it could,” said Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition.
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Open Access/Content
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There seems to be more than enough tit-for-tat to go around in the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Samsung. If we wanted to be snarky, we’d say we haven’t seen this much legal maneuvering since the last days of the Beatles and the “sue me, sue you blues.”
Oddly, this fight puts us American FOSSers in the position of supporting the guys on foreign soil over our homegrown boys from Cupertino because Samsung is being sued and sued again over their implementation of Android, reportedly a version of Linux. Then again, maybe it’s not so odd given the fact that Apple doesn’t really make anything here. The United States is for dreaming stuff up and Asia is for actually getting things done, or so it sometimes seems.
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Open Hardware
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When it comes to building vehicles, cars are relatively easy. So are boats. Heck, you can even make your own model rockets without a hitch (mostly). But putting together a plane requires some real aviation design and expertise.
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You’ve heard of open-source software that makes its source code freely available. Well, get ready for open-source power tools.
ShopBot Tools, an established Durham manufacturer of computer-driven, multi-purpose industrial tools, has developed a portable, hand-held version aimed at consumers that it touts as an “open hardware platform.”
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Intel started shipping their first “open-source” personal computer. According to several sources, Intel’s open source PC may be described as the best in terms of bare-bones system related to x86 devs. It also aimed to target the growing DIY market and the chip giant is well on its way in exploring what it has to offer.
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Programming
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Collaboration is one of the key principles of the open source way and a major topic here on opensource.com. One of our goals to highlight great collaboration stories, and when we discuss collaboration, the need for the perfect collaboration tool frequently comes up. One article, Avoid the tool trap when building communities, provides some great insights (hint: people create community, not tools).
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As anticipated, the LLVM Clang compiler has now enabled the use of its SLP Vectorizer by default.
LLVM developers have been anticipating turning on SLP vectorization by default and with today’s code activity they finally have turned it on when using the -O3 compiler optimization level.
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We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.1, which targets version 2.7.3 of the Python
language. This is the first release with official support for ARM processors in the JIT.
This release also contains several bugfixes and performance improvements.
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The co-editor of Boing Boing, novelist and fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation shares his tools for circumventing censorship in airports, easing back pain and sparking the curiosity of his 5-year-old daughter
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Health/Nutrition
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A co-founder of one of Russia’s most conspicuous Internet successes is said to be brain dead in a coma after being stricken suddenly while undergoing care for what the company described as “a treatable form of cancer.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Spy agency putting pressure on agents not to divulge information to media, congress about events surrounding 2012 Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, CNN reports
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A new field investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism provides evidence confirming revival of the use of “double tap” tactics that target rescuers coming to the scene of a previous drone strike.
The Bureau’(TBIJ) study concentrated mainly on strikes near a single village in North Waziristan many aimed at senior Al Qaeda figure Yahya al-Libi. He was finally killed in a strike on June 4, 2012.
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The original Benghazi scandal began when internal security at Benghazi was reduced from 34 people to just three by the State Department. Instead, groups known to be tied to al Qaeda terrorists were hired to guard the Benghazi consulate. These terror-linked guards abandoned Benghazi shortly before the attack. The State Department and the White House changed the Benghazi talking points significantly before the attack was announced to the public, causing some to claim the Benghazi scandal should impeach Obama since it’s claimed the actions were taken for political reasons.
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Oh, I know, I know: for over half a century your professors, Hollywood, the media, etc. have all hammered away that Batista was “a U.S. backed dictator!” and that, while fighting Batista, the Castro rebels also fought heroically and David-like against brutal and Goliath-like “Yankee imperialism!” But actually:
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The original, official account of last year’s attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, can be summed up as follows: A mob of Libyan demonstrators, enraged by a short You Tube video clip which insulted the Prophet Muhammed, stormed the Consulate and set it ablaze. No US military assets were available to effect a rescue mission and four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, tragically died. The President was barely aware of the situation and two of the most powerful agencies of the most powerful government on Earth – the US Department of State and Department of Defense – were unable to obtain real-time information of events on the ground and were also unable to do anything about it. Not one single individual has accepted any responsibility. As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “what difference, at this point, does it make?”
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One unnamed CIA source calls the Agency’s efforts to silence those who know the truth about Benghazi “unprecedented.” CIA agents operating in Benghazi have been subjected to monthly polygraph exams since January, according to “a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings.” These lie detector tests are being conducted in a bid to discern whether any agents are leaking information to Congress or the media.
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Prior to 2009, the CIA did not belong to any political party. Now, if this report is accurate, it’s looking like it has become an arm of Organizing for Action.
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SEVEN people were killed and three others injured in a US drone attack on a residential compound in Shawal tehsil of North Waziristan Agency on Sunday evening. According to the details, the drone fired two missiles minutes before Iftar at the compound in Sheenkai Narai area, about fifty kilometers from the Afghan border, destroying the house and the bodies of the deceased were charred beyond recognition.
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US Secretary of State John Kerry said in Pakistan that he hoped the drone strikes against militants would end “very, very soon”.
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Today we have a review of Mark Mazzetti’s new book about the CIA’s drone war, discussing America’s adoption of assassination as one its major modes of warfare. It’s a momentous step which, like the other large mad policies begun by America during the past decade, we have made thoughtlessly — and will later regret.
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Afghanistan’s NATO-led force has launched an investigation into the accidental killing of five Afghan policemen in a US air attack during an overnight operation that injured two others, the force said on Thursday.
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His crime was to expose the criminal nature of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US ruling elite were particularly affronted by the leaking of footage showing US forces killing unarmed people in Iraq.
While proclaiming Manning’s guilt, Barack Obama himself is guilty of numerous crimes. He has sent drones around the world to kill people on the basis of suspicion.
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CIA Director John Brennan sent a letter to the survivors of the Benghazi attacks inviting them to share information with congressional committees.
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Sources told CNN that 35 Americans were in Benghazi that night — 21 of whom were working out of the annex — and that several were wounded, some seriously.
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Transparency Reporting
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US Army private Bradley Manning was convicted on 19 counts, including charges under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for leaking approximately 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks.
While it was a relief that he was not convicted of the worst charge, “aiding the enemy”, the verdict remains deeply troubling and could potentially result in a sentence of life in prison.
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60 Minutes reporter Liz Hayes discusses her time inside the Ecuadorian Embassy with Julian Assange, his take on current Australian politics and Julian’s concern for whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.
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So how might the government deal with its classification problem? Herb Lin, a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences, believes that budgets must be used to change behavior.
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Finance
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When Republicans invite a Democrat to testify at a congressional hearing and Democrats invite a Republican, we should pay attention. Such cross-partisan connections aren’t common and typically indicate that congressional leaders are trying to answer difficult questions. That was certainly the case recently, when the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on how to end “too big to fail.”
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On July 9, the Organization of American States held a special session to discuss the shocking behavior of the European states that had refused to allow the government plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales to enter their airspace.
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National Security Administration whistleblower Edward Snowden fits the mold too well. By coming forward to journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, Snowden creates news and commands attention from Obama Administration, Congress, European Union, trading partners and citizens across the globe.
NSA is an out-of-control monster, Snowden contends. Top brass lie to Congress. Technocrats flout congressional authorization by conducting blanket searches when Congress okayed individual ones. Massive, intrusive surveillance of phone calls, email, web searches, Facebook accounts accompanied by secret orders of a secret court compromise and transform powerful American telecommunications network operators and Internet behemoths into spy engines.
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Everyone should read and understand the implications of these two sentences from the 2011 report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC).
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Censorship
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In response to many torrent sites being blocked by ISPs in the UK, dozens of proxies sprang up to ensure that users could still enjoy access. However, ISPs responded to rightsholder requests by blocking proxy sites too. Now a new service has appeared that not only unblocks torrent sites, but also unblocks proxies. It’s called Immunicity – and it’ll crack Cameron’s porn filter too.
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Privacy
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As Americans sort through their feelings regarding the disclosure of the massive collection of metadata by the National SecurityAdministration, we are now learning of what may be a far more insidious violation of our constitutional rights at the hands of a
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Activists in 20 cities protested Sunday against the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs that track Americans’ phone and email records.
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Documents provided by two House members demonstrate how they are blocked from exercising any oversight over domestic surveillance
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The vice chairman on the U.S. Senate intelligence Committee denied members of Congress were being blocked from seeing details of intelligence programs.
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NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations that the US government essentially monitors all communications going in and out of the US have led to accusations that the monitoring program is actually much wider than initially suspected. This is because international calls between two different parties in non-US countries are often routed through the US telephone exchange system, where the NSA has access.
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FreedomWeb, an Irish company known for providing hosting for Tor “hidden services” — services reached over the Tor anonymized/encrypted network — has shut down after its owner, Eric Eoin Marques, was arrested over allegations that he had facilitated the spread of child pornography. Users of Tor hidden services report that their copies of “Tor Browser” (a modified, locked-down version of Firefox that uses Tor by default) were infected with malicious Javascript that de-anonymized them, and speculate that this may have originated with with FBI.
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With this city repeatedly roiled by civil protests and the public’s attention sharply focused on government surveillance, local officials are pushing forward with a federally funded project to link surveillance cameras, license-plate readers, gunshot detectors, Twitter feeds, alarm notifications and other data into a unified “situational awareness” tool for law enforcement.
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The Wikimedia Foundation is speeding up its implementation of SSL encryption in light of surveillance revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden, claiming it had been the target of one of the programs.
The group, which manages Wikipedia, said it appeared to have been “specifically targeted by XKeyscore”, a program that assembles metadata on targets selected by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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ProPublica has produced a video showing, point-by-point all the ways that US government officials, all the way up to Obama, have told blatant lies about the details and extent of NSA spying.
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Anyone Who Says the Government Only Spies On Metadata Is Sadly Mistaken
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The U.S. government’s efforts to recruit talented hackers could suffer from the recent revelations about its vast domestic surveillance programs, as many private researchers express disillusionment with the National Security Agency.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-revelations-hurt-collaboration-with-hackers-who-now-feel-betrayed-2013-8#ixzz2azNCmCii
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Law-enforcement officials are expanding the range of methods and means they use for surveillance purposes. Now they are using tools routinely used by computer hackers while engaging in criminal acts. Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or web links. Such techniques are more commonly associated with attacks by criminals than surveillance conducted by law enforcement agencies.
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The U.S. government’s efforts to recruit talented hackers could suffer from the recent revelations about its vast domestic surveillance programs, as many private researchers express disillusionment with the National Security Agency.
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More than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the US still has several military bases in Germany. Experts think that they could play a key role for the NSA’s activities.
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Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who initially broke the Edward Snowden story, said the “top secret” leaked training slides showed that NSA analysts were able to search “with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”
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Germany has ended a spy treaty with the United States and Britain. The announcement was made Friday. This decision means the end of an agreement that goes back to the Cold War era.
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Privacy has a long tradition in modern Germany. In 1983 the German government wanted to organize a census and drafted a law for this census. People protested against this law in front of Germany’s highest court Bundesverfassungsgericht (“federal constitutional court”). The court did not only stop the census but went much further and did something which has never happened before in German history: the court created a new civil right directly derived from the other civil rights.
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Wikipedia is taking steps to make its site ‘unsnoopable’ to the NSA following revelations that its site users were being spied on. The measures will include the use of secure encryption for its logged-in users to minimize eavesdropping.
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There are tight controls on the NSA’s access to U.S. phone records and data from U.S. Internet companies, the agency’s director says.
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Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.
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More than 80 percent of adult Americans have a cellphone, and they make heavy use of them: calling for more than 2.3 trillion minutes a year and sending nearly 2.2 trillion text messages annually. And it is fair to assume that a good many of those users consider what they do with their devices to be private. It is far from certain, though, that the Constitution protects cellphone privacy. The courts are starting to give answers to that question.
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*Well, what else can he do, practically speaking? After all, it’s not like the guys who run the NSA invented *themselves.*
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As a followup, the terrorists won another victory with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security on November 25, 2002. This department gives a much more menacing facade to the federal government and proved to be the moment when American citizens got the idea that they were viewed as the enemy by their own government. Thankfully, our nation’s soul was not entirely obliterated. We have also enjoyed victories in the War on Terror, such as the failing of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 (nicknamed the “PATRIOT II Act”).
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Campaigners say mood has shifted in their favour since 4 July demonstrations against government surveillance
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In 2001, the Patriot Act opened the door to US government monitoring of Americans without a warrant. It was unconstitutional, but most in Congress over my strong objection were so determined to do something after the attacks of 9/11 that they did not seem to give it too much thought. Civil liberties groups were concerned, and some of us in Congress warned about giving up our liberties even in the post-9/11 panic. But at the time most Americans did not seem too worried about the intrusion.
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Civil Rights
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Section 230 of the law broadly protects Internet publishers and service providers from responsibility for user-generated content on their sites. But in June, a group of state attorneys general proposed a change to the law that would allow prosecution of publishers in cases where user-posted content violates state law.
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Divide activists into four groups: Radicals, Idealists, Realists and Opportunists. The Opportunists are in it for themselves and can be pulled away for their own self-interest. The Realists can be convinced that transformative change is not possible and we must settle for what is possible. Idealists can be convinced they have the facts wrong and pulled to the Realist camp. Radicals, who see the system as corrupt and needing transformation, need to be isolated and discredited, using false charges to assassinate their character is a common tactic.
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As representative democracy sinks into crisis, we need to go back to democracy in its original meaning as rule of the people. What could this look like?
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On July 9, the Organization of American States held a special session to discuss the shocking behavior of the European states that had refused to allow the government plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales to enter their airspace.
Morales was flying home from a Moscow summit on July 3. In an interview there he had said he was open to offering political asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. spy-agency contractor wanted by Washington on espionage charges, who was in the Moscow airport.
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Hackers disabled several websites of New Zealand’s ruling party to protest a new law that would enable the country’s spy agency to snoop on its citizens. Kim Dotcom said hacking the sites only gave PM John Key “a new excuse to pass the GCSB bill”.
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Government ministers and MPs are divided on whether the hacking of National Party websites is a legitimate protest or cyber crime.
But the hackers’ actions have drawn the ire of internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom.
The websites of 14 Government ministers, MPs and associated groups are out of order after being hacked by a group called “Anonymous” in protest at the GCSB legislation before Parliament.
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The Detroit Guild on Thursday sent a letter to Police Chief James Craig denouncing Free Press photographer Mandi Wright’s arrest last week after filming an arrest with an iPhone.
“The Guild demands that you issue a formal apology to Wright and that you take disciplinary action against the officers responsible for this illegal conduct against a photo journalist, who was just doing her job while witnessing a police arrest on a public street,” guild president Lou Mleczko wrote. He also sent a letter to Free Press publisher Paul Anger urging the organization “to take further action directed at the Detroit Police Department.”
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The Senate Judiciary Committee, looking to provide protections for journalists and their sources, ran into a roadblock Thursday when lawmakers couldn’t agree on the definition of “journalist.”
Under the legislation, journalists wouldn’t have to comply with subpoenas or court orders forcing them to reveal sources or confidential information unless a judge first determines there’s reason to think that a crime has occurred and government officials have exhausted all other alternatives.
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But despite the impressive sounding title, Spalding doesn’t know squat about nullification, as he’s demonstrated time and again in his confused but emphatic dissertations on the subject.
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But the situation is far more serious than what we thought. Yes, our Constitution is and has been under attack. And yes, the relationship between the individual and the government has been fundamentally altered. But the document that perhaps may be even more significant to us as Americans, the Declaration of Independence, is also under attack. The attack, if we want to be intellectually honest, started with the man the government touts as the greatest American president Abraham Lincoln.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Tucked away in Google Fiber’s terms of service is one clause that might annoy some technically inclined users. “Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you to do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection,” Google tells subscribers to its Gigabit Internet service.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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There aren’t as many amicus briefs in this second Viacom appeal as there were in the first, less than half, but there are six die-hards supporting Viacom’s second appeal who have just filed their amicus briefs in Viacom v. YouTube-Google. They don’t understand the Internet. They hate the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision, and they have learned absolutely nothing from history or from the rulings in this case so far.
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After swinging and missing twice, Viacom is telling an appeals court it needs an umpire who isn’t blind to YouTube’s alleged copyright infringement.
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In its ongoing war against online piracy, the MPAA is currently recruiting new soldiers. One of the open positions that caught our eye recently is that of an “Internet Analyst,” tasked with manipulating media files and monitoring social networks, communities and forums. For those still in school the MPAA also has a job opening for an unpaid summer intern to assist with various “content protection” projects.
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A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan.
Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.
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The U.S. Department of Commerce today released a green paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy (Green Paper) to advance discussion on a set of policy issues critical to economic growth. The Green Paper discusses the goals of maintaining an appropriate balance between rights and exceptions as the law continues to be updated; ensuring that copyright can be meaningfully enforced on the Internet; and furthering the development of an efficient online marketplace.
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A 2010 Planet Money podcast with “Hollywood economist” Edward Epstein explains how it’s done. For each new film, a movie “is set up as its own corporation, the entire point of which is to lose money” by paying fees to the studio producing the movie. So if Superhero Studios decides to film Spider-Man 10, they create a shell company, Spider-Man 10 Incorporated. Superhero Studios then overcharges Spider-Man 10 Inc for every aspect of making, marketing, and distributing the movie. By the time Superhero Studios finishes paying itself (through Spider-Man 10 Inc) to perform work that costs $100 million, Spider-Man 10 Inc will be on the hook for one billion dollars.
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Companies involved in open-source code, crowdsourcing, and fair use of intellectual property on Thursday delivered a strong message to U.S. lawmakers reviewing IP laws: Don’t forget about our businesses.
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Companies involved in open-source code, crowdsourcing, and fair use of intellectual property on Thursday delivered a strong message to U.S. lawmakers reviewing IP laws: Don’t forget about our businesses.
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The primary defense of the necessity of the US National Security Agency’s broad spying powers—including, apparently, recording pretty much everything anyone anywhere is doing on the internet—is that its activities are necessary to protect against terrorists and violent criminals. But a report published Saturday in the New York Times indicates that federal agencies with far more mundane mandates are unable to resist the lure of the NSA’s vast trove of data.
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When I founded the Swedish Pirate Party and decided to change the political landscape of the copyright monopoly, I frequently told reporters that the plan was to change Sweden, Europe, and the world – in that order. They usually backed away wondering whether I was serious, so I laid out the plan for them.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
08.03.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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The place where Linus gets his paycheck says the Penguin was driving
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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Not so very long ago, shipping goods over long distances was a very different matter than it is today. Numerous types of products were often jumbled together in a single vessel, sometimes with untoward consequences. Stack the bricks next to the bananas, for example, and you may have a mess on your hands when the shipment arrives.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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With Wine 1.6 having been released two weeks ago with 10,000+ changes, we’re now out of the code freeze and Wine 1.8 development has begun. Wine 1.7.0 was released today as the first version in this new development series.
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Games
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While Fez 2 has recently been cancelled by developer Phil Fish, Polytron’s producer Marie-Christine Bourdua has confirmed to Joystiq that the studio is still working with Sony on an upcoming project. Bourdua also confirmed that indie-hit Fez will be getting ported to Mac and Linux.
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Portal, an innovative single-player game developed and published by Valve, has been launched officially on Linux and a new Beta version is now available.
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Don’t Starve, a new action adventure developed by Klei Entertainment, has just received a major patch on all platforms.
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To be released soon is the Alien Arena 7.66 game update, but more interesting than this small update that just provides minor optimizations and an overhauled menu system, is the introduction of a new Alien Arena game. Alien Arena: Tactical is the new CRX-powered open-source game.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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There are many free and open source alternatives of Microsoft Office including LibreOffice and Calligra Suite. The Calligra team has announced the release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra active and the Calligra Office Engine.
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A new media center for KDE 5 / Plasma 2 has been in the works for a while and today Sinny Kumari posted some tangible details. With the release of a new beta, users can try it out too. Of course, it has that “smartphone” look, but it still works as a desktop application. Plasma Media Center 1.1 Beta introduces several cool new features besides a ton of bug fixes.
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We’ve been asked many times how to contribute to Kubuntu financially so we are now open for donations. Your donations will help finance project expenses such as hardware, travel and cloud computing.
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I’m living in Sweden.I’m currently working as a IT-Technician in a company called IT-Hantverkarna. Painting in my free time.
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Maria Far today announced the release of Krita 2.7 with “a lot of cool new features, bug fixes and improvements. Soon to come to a Linux distribution near you.” The transform tool was rewritten and said to be “hugely improved.” A new line smoothing ink function was highlighted, as well as “greyscale masks and selections.”
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Hey everyone! As we, the Artikulate team, are targeting to release Artikulate this fall, we would like to invite more and more contributors to come help us with the project (which is aimed at helping users with their language learning/pronunciation skills).
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The program of the Qt Contributor Summit was mostly determined by who was attending and what the important topics at the time were. KDAB attended the summit with strength, and participated in many relevant discussions.
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Project Neon is a fantastic resource for KDE developers giving daily builds for KDE software. It’s maintained by the lovely Kubuntu community on the lovely Launchpad infrastructure. KDE developers can install the various bits they need to develop their part of KDE without having to worry about compiling everything themselves. It installs everything into /opt so it doesn’t touch your normal software installation.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GUADEC 2013, GNOME’s annual European Conference, kicked off today in a warm and sunny Brno (Czech Republic). This is the main GNOME event of the year, and there are hundreds of contributors here for 8 days of talks and working events.
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Ali Linx (almost Linux ;)) from Lubuntu is the new Head of QA in Ubuntu GNOME (UG) and he is asking for your help to test 13.10 release. Furthermore the cool guys from UG community have some new wikis!
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Foss Force has the results of a poll of their readers that asked about their first Linux distro. Wow. Talk about taking me back a long, long time! I haven’t thought about how I got started with Linux for ages.
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Parted Magic, an operating system that employs core programs of GParted and Parted to handle partitioning tasks with ease, while featuring other useful software, is now at version 2013.08.01.
Parted Magic 2013.08.01 integrates a large number of updates, but the developers also chose to fix some old problems and add some new features.
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Back on June 23, when we asked you to name the first Linux distro you ever used, we pretty much knew that the choice “Other” would take the day.
That’s because we wanted to be completely neutral, so the ten choices we offered besides “Other” were just the top ten distros from the Distrowatch “Page Hit Ranking,” which meant that those who started their Linux life with something other than Debian or SUSE in the pre-Ubuntu era were not represented.
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Zorin has a history of creating pretty refined Ubuntu spins specifically targeted to newcomers. Their recent release Zorin OS 7 is based on Ubuntu 13.04 and it has 6 months of support. I earlier reviewed the Zorin OS 7 Core (with GNOME desktop) and found it to be very good in terms of functionality, stability and aesthetics. Zorin, as a tradition, first releases the core or GNOME distro and follows it up with “Lite” and “Educational Lite”, two lightweight Zorin OS variants with LXDE desktop. Both are actually Lubuntu 13.04 spins. I, myself, am a big fan of LXDE desktop as it is possibly the most efficient of all fully featured DEs. However, LXDE requires the users to have a little bit of expertise in Linux; simple things such as autologin, adding programs to start up, setting up compositing manager, etc. are easier in other desktop environments (DEs) like XFCE, KDE & GNOME. However, of late, I saw LXDE control center in PCLinuxOS and ROSA which actually makes these things easier for the users.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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I’ve been seriously slacking on the Sabayon stuff, but been hanging with the community on the Official Sabayon Facebook page and watched a thread on a background image erupt into a mountain. It really is amazing at how a small change to a GUI send people running for their pitchforks and torches. I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself and probably will be in the future too. The GUI is very important to us and it’s drastic unchangeable changes really ticks a guy off. Gnome and KDE both felt the feedback when they revamped their GUIs. I abandoned Gnome cause of the gnome shell. Some love the gnome-shell and brag it up and down. Gnome maybe pays them to do it….
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Red Hat Family
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After a couple of really hot days I’m back with a short overview of what kept us[1] busy while working on KDE in Red Hat this month.
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Fedora
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The Fedora 17 operating system, otherwise known under the name of Beefy Miracle, is now officially dead.
It’s not uncommon for the developers to stop supporting various operating systems and now the time has come for Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle), an OS launched a little over a year ago, on May 29, 2012.
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Debian Family
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Congratulations to OSI Director Martin Michlmayr, who was one of the recipients of an O’Reilly Open Source Award at OSCON in Portland, OR last week.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu Forums are back to normal following a serious hack attack that exposed the usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords of 1.8 million open source users.
Parent firm Canonical restored the forums on Tuesday as well as publishing a detailed summary of what went wrong and the broad steps it has taken to beef up security.
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Verizon and T-Mobile have announced that they’ll be supporting the Ubuntu phone in the United States.
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Canonical has been busy lately getting more and more carriers to join its Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group. They had succeeded in getting some of the key players from major markets around the globe leaving one of the biggest markets the US. The company has now cracked the US market as well. Both Verizon and T-Mobile have joined the CAG.
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Ambitious scheme to build dual-boot smartphone which can double up as a desktop computer running Ubuntu has fallen deep into the ‘dead zone’ – and won’t get bailout
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A very early version of the Unity 8 user-interface for phones and mobile devices is now available for testing on Ubuntu 13.10 without needing to use any special package repositories or other complicated steps.
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The Italian Institute of Technology gave its first public demonstration of a Linux-based quadruped robot for navigating rough terrain. Meanwhile, a new version of the Hydraulic Quadruped (Hyq) robot is under development that can “feel” and step over obstacles using a step reflex algorithm, letting the robot navigate more easily in low-visibility environments.
Linux-based robots come in all shapes and sizes, from Biorob’s ankle-high Cheetah-cub Robot to the knee-high models that can be built from the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot kit to NASA’s full-scale humanoid Robonaut 2. In the heavyweight class, we’ve seen Micromagic Systems’ 2.8-meter, 1800-Kilogram Mantis Hexapod Walking Machine. Now, the Department of Advanced Robotics at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology, or IIT), has developed another heavyweight contender in the Hydrolic Quadruped (Hyq) robot.
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Since BeagleBoard was born five years ago, the four open-source BeagleBoard.org platforms (BeagleBoard, BeagleBoard-xM, BeagleBone, and, most recently, BeagleBone Black) have made a deep impact on the open-source world. They have enabled fun and functional projects, including superhero costumes, robots, and home automation gadgets.
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The PC, called the MinnowBoard, is basically a motherboard with no casing around it. It was codeveloped by Intel and CircuitCo Electronics, a company that specializes in open-source motherboards, and went on sale this month for US$199 from a handful of retailers.
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Aaeon announced the availability of a rugged, Linux-compatible embedded controller computer that measures only 4.9 x 3.0 x 0.73 inches. The AEC-6401 Compact Embedded Controller runs on a dual-core, 1.6GHz Intel Atom N2600 processor, offers an SSD bay, provides gigabit Ethernet, USB, HDMI and serial connectivity, and supports -20 to 40°C fanless operation.
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Phones
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Android
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Zeebox pitches itself as a “TV sidekick” that helps you discover new shows and learn more about shows you’re already familiar with. I found the experience similar to that obtained in a Twitter session with a Twitter hashtag, where you follow based on hashtag as the show plays out. One difference with Zeebox is that it has a built-in schedule — you can see upcoming shows without leaving the app.
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The Folder is a flip phone that comes with a dual-sided touch screen, according to a manual discovered on Samsung’s site.
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Is the Ubuntu Edge, the Linux-powered “superphone” that Canonical hopes to develop through a crowdsourced funding campaign, a dying prospect? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the project hasn’t already succeeded in significantly advancing Canonical’s goals in the smartphone and mobile-device market. Here’s why.
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According to the current industry trend, smartphone makers are releasing a cheaper, ‘Mini’ version of their flagship devices. We had HTC One Mini and Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, now Motorola is said to be making a cheaper version of the Moto X that was released yesterday, will it be the Moto X Mini?
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There is a lot to love about the Chromecast. It lets you stream your browser, your desktop, and a number of apps directly to your TV with little more than a $35 dongle that plugs into HDMI on your TV. However, lately, a few problems have arisen. For one, it’s really difficult to find one unless you’re willing to wait weeks for the next stock to come in. Additionally, the root method that was discovered over at XDA has since been patched. So Google isn’t letting everyone play fast and loose with their new dongle. It’s still a great device, but it’s not perfect and now there is an alternative called PiCast.
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If you were planning to get a wooden phone, whole boot loader you can unlock without using an axe, you are going to get very very disappointed.
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Nvidia began shipping its Nvidia Shield handheld gaming console, which runs Android 4.2.1 on a 1.9GHz Tegra 4 SoC, for $300. Early reviews praised the device on just about every level except for its weight and price, and the lack of decent Tegra-optimized Android games, while an iFixit teardown found an internal design unlike anything it had ever seen.
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Android 4.3 added significant new security features, and Google has also added two other new security features to older versions of Android. Now, if only the carriers and OEMs would patch the Bluebox security hole every Android user would be happier.
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Four months after the launch of Facebook Home, which aimed to turn every Android phone into the long-rumored Facebook Phone, the company is starting to bring certain Home features into their primary app with an update today. In other words, bits and pieces of Home are coming to the main app… without requiring anyone to actually download Home.
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Today at the Black Hat Security conference, Forristal delivered a talk that detailed precisely what the Android master key vulnerability is all about. As Forristal explained, Google’s Android had multiple vulnerabilities in how the operating system verifies JAR/ZIP/APK files, which run on Android devices.
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New phone, new spy-software
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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According to Canalys, 31% of personal computer shipments in Q2 of 2013 were tablets and Android/Linux was on 53% of those tablets.
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Rackspace VP of Intellectual Property Van Lindberg was one of six tech-industry executives testifying before the House Judiciary Committee about intellectual property on Thursday. He highlighted the value of open source and the sometimes ridiculous nature of DMCA takedown requests.
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This week, Intel announced the Minnowboard, a small embedded development board akin to the RaspberryPi, BeagleBoard and similar devices. The point that grabbed my attention is that it’s being touted as an “open source computer”. The device is shipped running Ångström and is compatible with the Yocto project for building custom embedded Linux systems, but while there are many devices available that run Linux, the term “open source computer” is seldom bandied about. So just how “open source” is the Minnowboard?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Marking yet another milestone for Mozilla’s Firefox OS mobile phone platform, devices based on it have arrived in Venezuela and Colombia, and Mozilla has just announced hat Firefox OS phones will arrive in Brazil in the fourth quarter of this year. When we covered Mozilla’s mobile plans back in April, the company was targeting five countries to deliver the phones in: Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. It’s quickly becoming clear, though, that these phones will show up in many more markets.
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SaaS/Big Data
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SaaS applications and mobile applications are big business drivers for a faster, more agile approach to the integration layer, says Chris Purpura, vice president and general manager for MuleSoft’s CloudHub integration-as-a-service platform.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Advertising regulators cite Oracle a fourth time for running “overboard and unsupported” ads, will refer matter to Federal Trade Commission.
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CMS
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I’m going to assume you already have Joomla set up. Your next step is to customize Joomla to meet the needs of your business. First, be clear on the purpose of your Joomla site. Is it primarily for e-commerce, a web portal, or perhaps a static website? Choose a template for your Joomla site that fits your site’s goals and is convenient for your site’s visitors to browse. Pre-made templates, some free and some for pay, are popular among casual Joomla users since they’re ready to use. You can also create your own template, or hire a web designer to create one for you.
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Business
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In its latest “next generation” leap to service the global business community, industry innovator xTuple takes on both proprietary and open source software with its Cloud 2.0 service and a new evaluation methodology, hosted in the Cloud.
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Open is beautiful
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GnuTLS is a secure communications library implementing the SSL, TLS and DTLS protocols and technologies around them. It provides a simple C language application programming interface (API) to access the secure communications protocols as well as APIs to parse and write X.509, PKCS #12, OpenPGP and other required structures. It is aimed to be portable and efficient with focus on security and interoperability.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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SoftLayer Technologies, a cloud infrastructure services provider and a recent IBM purchase, recently hosted infrastructure for a contest among developers of open-source robot-control software.
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Licensing
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Binaries, those pieces of an application that go with all that sexy code, are increasingly becoming important as documentation for how software and services are built.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open-source code is a huge boon startups and the internet at large — it allows for apps and services that would take months or even years of coding to spring up without much extra work. But there’s also a distinct problem with open source: It doesn’t pay.
Khan Academy, the online learning platform that has been active in the open-source community and released its code through GitHub, is now trying to bring financial as well as technological support to developers that contribute their services for free.
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Open Data
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I began paragliding a few years ago. It’s maybe the most weather-dependent sport in the world. We often fly in mountainous areas, very close to the ground. We need to know about local effects like thermal updrafts, clouds growth, mountain-breeze, foehn wind, and all sorts of other micro weather effects.
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Open Access/Content
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Textbooks are incredibly expensive (not to mention cumbersome and heavy in dead tree format). Smart students can pick up free digital textbooks from several sources, including one we haven’t mentioned before: Rice University’s OpenStax College.
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Open Hardware
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A study by Michigan Technological University claims that the average US household could save itself up to $2,000 by printing their own products and parts instead of buying them from the store.
“With the exponential growth of free designs and expansion of 3D printing, we are creating enormous potential wealth for everyone,” said professor Joshua Pearce, coauthor of the paper “Life-cycle economic analysis of distributed manufacturing with open-source 3-D printers”, published in Mechatronics.
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Performance Mattered During Competition to Advance Robotics Capabilities in Disaster Scenarios
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A group of Canadian pilots and engineers are designing a small, two-seat airplane that is affordable, safe and easy to fly. The MakerPlane project aims to qualify as a light sport aircraft and the group wants to give the designs away for free, making it the first-ever open source airplane.
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Programming
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Perforce, which provides version management and document collaboration solutions for the enterprise, says working together within the channel can level the playing field between large organizations and small startups. That’s the message in the company’s report this week on the first year of its 20/20 Program, which promotes use of Perforce products by small companies.
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Science
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Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.
[...]
Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of “the prisoner’s dilemma”, a scenario of game theory – the study of strategic decision-making.
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Hardware
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When AMD64 (AMD) and EM64T (Intel) CPU technology was new and ready for the prime market, there was much talk about whether the real-world was ready for 64bit computing in the consumer sector. At the time, 64bit computing had been around in the server sector for quite some time.
Well, it’s now 2013 and we are still talking about whether 64bit computing is ready, as opposed to good old reliable 32bit.
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Security
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The chief engineer of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab gives the crowed at Black Hat advice on how to innovate successfully.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The CIA-operated unmanned aerial combat vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, killed more people in Pakistan per missile strike in July, 2013 than at any other point in the past 12 months, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported.
According to the Bureau’s tally, the CIA carried out at least three strikes in July, 2013. This was the busiest month since January for CIA’s drones with the strikes claiming at least 23 lives, eight of them identified by name.
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Yemeni security officials say a suspected U.S. drone has killed three alleged al-Qaida members in the country’s volatile south.
The officials say a drone-fired missile hit a car early on Thursday in the southern city of Hadramawt, setting it on fire and killing three men who were inside it.
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Since 2002, the United States has killed thousands of people in missile strikes and covert military operations, including innocent civilians and even its own citizens.
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About 30 militants and more than 200 other inmates escaped from the Dera Ismail Khan jail after a squad of highly trained Taliban fighters armed with grenade launchers and dressed as police overran the facility in the early hours of Tuesday.
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On Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry hinted that U.S. drones strikes in Pakistan could end soon. This news largely echoes a line in Obama’s May counterterrorism speech when the president said that “by the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we’ve made against core Al-Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.” After Obama gave that speech, it was only a matter of days before a new drone strike in Pakistan made front-page news. Despite the best intentions of President Obama and Secretary Kerry, drone strikes in Pakistan will only end when they are no longer an effective means to take out enemy targets.
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Obama has even usurped the unilateral power of killing American citizens with drones without due process. No other American president has ever claimed to have such a power outside of the U.S. Constitution.
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The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year, according to reports.
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In May CNN’s Jake Tapper argued that the CIA’s presence in Benghazi, where four Americans were killed in an attack on September 11, 2012, should be scrutinized.
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A field investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Pakistan’s tribal areas appears to confirm that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) last year briefly revived the controversial tactic of deliberately targeting rescuers at the scene of a previous drone strike. The tactic has previously been labelled a possible war crime by two UN investigators.
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Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit in the 1990s, said Saturday on Fox News that the new allegations are about “intimidation” and “persecution.”
“The people who risked their lives on the ground in Libya…are now being intimidated that their careers will be ruined or they will be fired if they happen to say what was going on on the ground at the time,” Scheuer said. “I’ve known John Brennan and he’s the director there and he’s a bully of the first order. He will never say anything negative or question anyone above him, but for the people below him he is a bully of epic dimensions.”
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Transparency Reporting
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Among the charges that Army Private Bradley Manning was found guilty of this week was computer fraud—for using a free, open-source program.
When Manning downloaded thousands of classified files, he used wget, a simple Web program that’s been around since 1996. Anyone can use wget to store downloaded files, and yet the government managed to convince the military court that Manning’s use of it amounted to computer fraud.
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One of the charges for which a military court found Army Pfc. Bradley Manning guilty on Tuesday is computer fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. But the nature of that conviction might surprise people who haven’t been following the case closely: it all comes down to a simple little Web program that dates back to 1996.
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Finance
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As the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) gears up for its 40th birthday party in Chicago, Illinois, next week, some state legislatures are digging into taxpayers’ pockets to pay for ALEC politicians to travel to the birthday bash.
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Endless debates over austerity vs. stimulus policies agitate governments. Which is “the correct” one to escape global capitalism’s ongoing crisis? The debates proceed as if official pol1icies were key to ending crises. But the politicians’ fights over policies are mostly distractions from the main events: how crises usually end themselves and their immense social costs.
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The March on Washington aimed to secure a decent, livable wage for all Americans as a way to reduce income inequality. Fifty years later, that noble goal remains unachieved. In fact, the 1970s proved to be a turning point. The decades since show a steady decline in the share of national income going to the lower 50 percent and, indeed, to the lower 90 percent of American households.
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Christin King, like many college students, is worried about keeping up her grades and squeezing in extracurricular activities while holding a job.
“I’m really stressing out,” she says. “I don’t know how I’m going to fit it all in.”
Her job, working in the campus library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, pays minimum wage, she says. And though a portion of her college tuition is covered by financial aid, King will still graduate with a large amount of student-loan debt, she says.
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Washington DC City Council bill will require Walmart and other giant non-union retailers moving into the city to pay a living wage: $12.50, instead of the capitol’s standard $8.25. Walmart, which feels targeted by the legislation, says it may scrap plans to open six stores in DC as a result, sparking media sympathy not for the workers but instead for the corporation.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In response to a viewer question asking if negative actions in video games were seen as sinful by God, Pat Robertson referred to games like “Grand Theft Auto” and said, “if you’re murdering somebody in cyberspace in a sense you’re performing the act, you like it or not.”
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Censorship
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Tor’s famous for anonymizing your Internet activities and infamous for being a pain to use. Debuting at Black Hat, the Tortilla tool smooths out some of the global network’s rough edges.
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PM’s high-profile adviser lambasts plans to block online porn, and says police need more resources to fight internet crime
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Privacy
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From the middle of a Dutch field at the OHM 2013 festival, I managed to do this interview for RT about GCHQ taking large sums of money from its US equivalent, the NSA….
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But journalism that wanted to take a more independent look at issues like who is granted asylum by a given country, or how countries refused to extradite those wanted on serious charges, might consider cases where the United States has protected suspected criminals–people who have caused actual harm in the world.
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New Snowden leaks show Verizon, Vodafone, and BT share direct data.
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There is currently a huge public discussion going on about privacy, what it means in the Internet age, is it important or an outdated concept? Are there exceptions allowed? Does the government have special rights to see private documents and communication of the people? Does the government have the right to keep information about what it is doing private or should the government be 100% transparent? Is security more important than privacy?
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US has funded the UK’s largest intelligence agency in return for access to intelligence…
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Last August, NSA head General Keith Alexander was the T-shirted hero of Def Con, a somewhat lawless hacker gathering in Las Vegas. He promised that the NSA doesn’t keep a file on every American, perhaps telling the literal truth but not exactly disclosing what, in a year’s time, would become widespread knowledge.
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A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases, according to documents provided to The Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden. “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”
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It makes sense for the US and UK to co-operate and share, but payments between the two agencies must mean influence
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The bill, proposed on July 24 and coined The Surveillance State Repeal Act, momentarily provided the American constituency with a glimmer of hope for humanity, until it was inevitably sent to a committee which will, much like a CIA blacksite, make sure it never sees the light of day again.
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Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) Keith Alexander was heckled during his talk at the BlackHat conference in Las Vegas yesterday, as the body defended itself against fresh claims it is able to snoop on anything anyone does in the Internet.
Alexander was always going to attract a lot of attention, some of it negative, given the revelations from the Edward Snowden leaks on massive NSA surveillance operations. One heckler shouted he didn’t trust Alexander, even accusing him of lying to Congress, which the NSA chief quickly denied.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed a new batch of slides claiming to document a computer system allowing the National Security Agency to search through a vast database of emails, browsing histories and the private Facebook messages of millions of individuals.
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In both the House and Senate, the Judiciary committees want to impose new limits on surveillance — while the Intelligence committees are lining up to defend the agency.
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When looking at a website URL, the S in HTTPS stands for Secure. Thus, with HTTPS agencies, like the NSA, or internet service providers cannot read the content of data that a website and its users exchange unless they break it with encryption. From August 21, Wikimedia will eventually makes this standard on its site for all browsing users who are logged-in.
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You’ve never heard of XKeyscore, but it definitely knows you. The National Security Agency’s top-secret program essentially makes available everything you’ve ever done on the Internet — browsing history, searches, content of your emails, online chats, even your metadata — all at the tap of the keyboard.
The Guardian exposed the program on Wednesday in a follow-up piece to its groundbreaking report on the NSA’s surveillance practices. Shortly after publication, Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former Booz Allen Hamilton employee who worked for the NSA for four years, came forward as the source.
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Edward Snowden’s father Lon: “I am thankful to the Russian people”
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Proposals signify major shift in political opinion as laws would represent the first rollback of the NSA’s powers since 9/11
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In return for the payment GCHQ was required to ‘pull its weight’, according to the documents which were leaked last night
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Lon Snowden told the FBI he would not be used as an ‘emotional tool’
Edward’s father supports his son’s decision to seek asylum in Russia
He says his son would never get a fair trial in the U.S. if he returned
Described his son as ‘patriotic’ and ‘wholesome’ and never cruel
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It’s not about Obama or party loyalty. It’s about the reality that public opinion on privacy versus security can change quickly
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Party establishments oppose change but ferment grows as president meets lawmakers and libertarians sense their moment
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Congress slithered out of town Friday for its August recess with the budget in shambles, a government shutdown looming and another bloodbath over raising the debt ceiling on the horizon. Small wonder that Congress boasts an approval rating so low that its popularity is rivaled by terminal diseases and middle seats on trans-Atlantic flights.
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Civil Rights
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Instead, commissioners voted 2-1 to adopt a resolution they had asked the county lawyer to draft. They also added a clause allowing the sheriff to challenge the authority of federal authorities who might impose the NDAA on individuals.
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The bill’s primary sponsor is current gubernatorial candidate Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (R-33rd District).Donnelly’s bill specifically guarantees the right of citizens of California to be free from any federal law, including the NDAA, that would authorize their indefinite detention in violation of habeas corpus.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Yesterday, a group of technology executives visited the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to discuss technology innovation and copyrights. The lengthy meeting produced some minutes that include interesting arguments. In particular, it’s worth reading a PDF record of comments from Rackspace Vice President of Intellectual Property Van Lindberg. Van Lindberg argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is widely misused and lamented the actions of patent trolls
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